The Dialetic Ad Absurdum

Mission Accomplished!

2008-05-02T00:03:00.000-07:00

Five years later, and our mission remains "accomplished" as it was five years earlier.

(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue?

2008-05-01T00:52:00.000-07:00

Reading Invisible Man always helps me to keep it real: every time I think I've got it all figured out, when I think I have constructed some kind of a plausible justification, the book simply knocks all that bullshit down and slaps me around a couple of time, mockingly, but also affectionately, to tell me that I don't know shit.

Which is good, because one can never get complacent and think that it's all figured out.

Take, for instance, the situation of my imminent graduation from college and entrance into the real world, wherever and whatever that is. And it so happens that in my fifth time of reading it, I happen to come across the part of the story when the narrator, the titular invisible man, leaves college and is going to Harlem on a bus. He meets this veteran, who may or may not be crazy, and receives some difficult advice.

In so many words, the veteran basically puts a scapel to the narrator's hopes and dreams, exposing the deep fear and insecurities that underlie them. For example, he talks about the "freedom" that the narrator will experience in the North that the South simply cannot afford him. And with penetrating psychological insight, the veteran breaks down such "freedoms" by saying

Most of the time he'll be working, and so much of his freedom will have to be symbolic. And what will be his or any man's most easily accessible symbol of freedom? Why, a woman, of course. In twenty minutes he can inflate that symbol with all the freedom which he'll be too busy working to enjoy the rest of the time.

And there, in that one passage, the veteran not only destroyed the narrator's notion of freedom, but also my notion of freedom. You see, why the fuck would I pick myself up and move my sorry ass across the continent? Because, in my mind, DC represents freedom: freedom to start somewhere new in a place--a stranger in a strange land you might say; a freedom from what I perceive to be a future of conformity, by doing something that Asian Americans usually don't do--work in politics. But are those also not so many lies and insecurities? Are those also nothing but mere empty, grandstanding, self-righteous rhetoric wrapped in so many hollow notions of individualism? In the end, whatever "freedom" I may have envisioned for myself in the future will probably be little more than symbolic.

The vet then goes on to tell the invisible man about "the game," with a tone of mixed cynicism and wisdom, a tone that at once says both that the game is corrupt and also that it must be played, and played well.

But for God's sake, learn to look beneath the surface. Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it in your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate. You might even beat the game.

And that, friends, is how I feel about the future. In the end, one necessarily compromises one's principles and learn to "play the game" and play it well. But therein lies the difficulty: how to both play and excel at the game without believing it, without becoming a part of the game. The vet seems to believe that there is a right balance that one can strike, such that one can both succeed and not be assimilated, but personally, I somehow doubt that. Or have I compromised fatally by accepting compromises of any kind, to any extent?

Finally, the vet talks about the people out there, the "they," and this passage strikes me as very Heideggerian:

They? Why, the same they we always mean, the white folks, authority, the gods, fate, circumstances--the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be pulled anymore. The big man who's never there, where you think he is.

That, I suppose, is also my fear as well. Not so much directed towards white people, but toward things out there beyond my control.

But in the end, this too, this very blog post, is just all bullshit talk. Yet even then, the vet has an appropriate answer:

Sure, I'm a compulsive talker of a kind, but I'm really more clown than fool.

That's probably what I am--a compulsive talker who's full of shit most of the time.

Pops and Duke under One Roof

2008-04-29T22:26:00.001-07:00

Louis Armstrong + Duke Ellington = THE WIN

Seriously, how can you NOT like two of the immortals playing together? Norman Granz was a genius for bringing these two together to record. The Great Summit is the album that resulted from the only known recording session that these two ever did. I can't think of one good reason why anyone who call himself a jazz fan would not want this album.

Satchmo and the Duke are both on their game in this song, but I want to point out the clarinet player, Barney Bigard, also does a tremendous job. In fact, the whole band is very much loose and relaxed here; it really does feel like a cool after-hours jam session. It also helps that the the album was recorded very well--if your stereo is up to par, it really does seem like the band is playing in the living room.

In other news, does anyone else besides me think that a tax-holiday on gasoline during the summer is the stupidest fucking policy idea ever? I mean, Jesus, if we are trying to reduce our dependence on crude oil, then why the fuck are we driving up the demand for it?

Sure, it's a crowd-pleaser, but on a policy-level, it makes no sense, at all. All we are doing is drive up demand for gas, which means increasing the already high gas prices, and transferring the increased wealth from increasing gas prices to the very countries whom we are trying to wean ourselves from.

Does that make sense to anyone at all?

The Asian Cultural Legacy in America, or: How There is None

2008-04-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

A thought experiment, if you will: suppose in a hundred year's time, Asian people have all disappeared from America, what would they leave so that they might not be forgotten?

The answer, at least on the many times when I have thought about it, is none.

Asian people have left no cultural legacy in America: we have written no great novels, composed no great music, thought no great philosophy, and sure as hell did not reshape politics.

In other words, Asian people have made not a single dent on the cultural and intellectual landscape of America.

This is not to say that Asian people have not written, composed, or philosophized? Because surely we have, and history backs this up.

But what troubles me is this: Asians have not written, composed, or philosophized in America. At least, not in a significant enough manner to have left a lasting legacy.

It is high time for Asian Americans to get out of the marginalized dungeon that is the Asian Studies departments across campuses, and into the broad daylight that is the American cultural and intellectual pantheon.

Where is our Faulkner? Where is our Gershwin? Duke Ellington? Bob Dylan? Where is our Coppolas and Scorceses? Where is our John Rawls and William James? On every cultural front, Asian Americans have made no significant stride.

In other words, what the fuck have we contributed to the American ideas and culture? Our two most prominent academics, Fukuyama and John Yoo are known as a supporter of an unjust war and an enabler of torture.

No matter how much money we make, or how successful we become, no matter how well-off our children are, in the end, we will NEVER belong to this country, this society, if we never even leave our mark on its culture and its ideas. Because 100 years from now, no one is going to remember how much money we have made, or how high we've climbed the corporate ladder, or how big our houses are.

And I sincerely believe that it is not a matter of talent or skills, because Asian people are skilled. I think the matter is one of effort: I just don't see it. Look, we can be the most successful engineers, doctors, and lawyers in the fucking world, and it would not matter one fucking bit, because until we have made ourselves felt in the world of ideas and culture, we might as well not exist. Sure, our non-existence will be prosperous, but it is non-existence nonetheless.

Failing to write The Great American Novel is not what bothers me, because the road to greatness is paved with innumerable failures. What bothers me is the lack of effort, and perhaps the lack of awareness: the awareness that it is not merely enough to do well financially in order to truly belong to a community, any community.

In order to TRULY belong to a community, its members must participate in the community's cultural and intellectual formation and undertaking. Because that, at the end of the day, is what determines what a community is, how it thinks of itself. In other words, if Asian Americans don't even want to participate in the creation of an American identity, then we will never be Americans.

This is not to say that we have to sell out: after all, Ralph Ellison wrote about the black experience, but we don't think of Invisible Man as a "black" novel, but rather one of the finest examples of the AMERICAN novel. Similarly, jazz is not merely "black" music, but is instead perhaps America's finest contribution to the musical culture around the world.

True, Asians have thousands of years worth of culture and ideas that they can proudly call their own, but we are in America, and in America, our cultural contribution is, if not entirely absent, then at least sorely lacking.

And lest I confuse you: I'm not saying that cultural and intellectual undertakings take priority above all else. No, if survival is not guaranteed, then those undertakings are of not importance whatsoever. But that is my point: we Asians have done very well for ourselves in America, so survival can and should no longer be our most pressing priority. That kind of mentality no longer fits our economic reality.

In other words, Asians have done well enough for themselves that they now have the luxury of undertaking cultural and intellectual endeavors.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe all it takes is time.

Chinese Nationalism

2008-04-25T03:26:00.000-07:00

I seem to remember, some posts back, that I would stop talking about China, Tibet, and the whole Olympic Torch incident.

Well, I lied.

John Quiggin posts over at Crooked Timber about what effects, if any, the protests will have on China-Tibet relations. I think it is a pretty good post, and articulates, in a far better way than I have done, why I feel the entire incident is overblown.

Quigging concludes that:

In fact, however, the protests have focused* entirely on the national claims of Tibet (as represented by the government in exile of the Dalai Lama) and have produced an unsurprising nationalist reaction in China (effectively in support of the existing government). The result, almost certainly, is that the position of supporters of democracy will be worse than ever, with any criticism of the Chinese authorities being viewed as support for external attacks on China’s territorial integrity.

He's right on the money about the nationalist reaction the whole thing has produced in China, and talking to my grandparents, who pay much more attention to Chinese media in America than I do, the nationalist sentiment seems to be in full effect.

Furthermore, Quiggin goes on to say that:

As far as Tibet is concerned, all this is likely to prove counterproductive. A democratic Chinese government would almost certainly come around to the viewpoint that territorial control over Tibet is an expensive indulgence, in terms of both economic cost and international standing, while a democratic and independent Tibet would have little choice but to pursue close economic and political ties with China. But as long as China remains in its current political stasis, no movement on this issue is likely.

Again, I have to agree with him: if the real desired goal is Tibetan independence, then the protests have done little, if anything at all, to move any closer toward the goal. Instead, the nationalist reaction provoked by the protests will only reinforce the credibility and the legitimacy of the Communist regime in China. I mean, even if the Dalai Lama is advocating non-separation and is willing to negotiate with the Communist government, certainly the protests have made the two sides more polarized and their positions more entrenched.

And to go beyond Tibet, I have to wonder: when the fuck is the Communist government ever going to stop fanning the nationalist flame? When the hell are they going to realize that China is now a superpower and no longer need such chest-puffing exercises to show its power? This is the same kind of obsessive inferiority-complex that makes China-Taiwan relations impossible to move forward.

The Chinese government should realize by now that even if Tibet and Taiwan wanted separation, they have no real choice but to remain extremely close to the central government because of China's status as a hegemonic power in the region? Let's say that Tibet is indeed free, hypothetically, there is very little possibility that it will not maintain close relations with the Chinese government.

But may the Chinese government does have some cause for concern, since the Han Chinese makes up only a small minority in China's territory. It is my hope that in the future, China will evolve into some kind of federal system, in which constituent units are divided along ethnic lines with certain degrees of self-rule, but still maintain very close relationship to Beijing.

Then again, that may be, and probably is, just a pipe dream.

The Politics of Whisky

2008-04-20T01:09:00.000-07:00

Finish the shot HRC! Don't waste whisky, which I believe counts as a mortal sin in Catholicism, the last time I checked.

But of course, this really shows that she's "one of us regular folks," because as we all know, there is nothing more Joe Sixpack-ish than Crown Royal, a whisky that comes in a fucking plush blue velvet bag.

Let's just forget about this blatant pandering for a moment, let us forget the cynical "populist" turn being performed here: what does it matter at all, at the end of the day, whether the President is "one of us" or not?

Besides, let it be said that real men only drink Jameson!

One Debate to Ruin Them All

2008-04-17T01:12:00.000-07:00

I have to say, out of the 21 Democratic debates held so far, I've watched at least 15 of them, but man, last night's debate was the worst of them all.

Question: what is the purpose of spending half of the debate asking questions about who-said-what, who-is-friends-with-whom, and other inane bullshit?

Who was really served when a 60s radical (Bill Ayers, if you are keeping score at home) was brought up? And who was really served when Obama brought up an obscure comment HRC made back in '92?

And the media accuses Obama of being out of touch with the common people: sure, because there is nothing more relevant to the people of Pennsylvania than who-was-on-the-board-with-whom, and who-pardoned-whom, and who-baked-cookies.

We are all just dying to find out, for the six hundred thirty seventh time, what kind of sniper fire that HRC was under.

I propose no more debates, because let us be honest here: how much more can we take? And how much do we REALLY care about Guam?

Elitist?

2008-04-16T02:02:00.000-07:00

I am not sure how much the elitism charge really holds when you are running for the most elite position in the country, and possibly the entire world.

It takes someone, and I do not mean any disrespect by this, who really thinks that he's better than 99 percent of the people in the country in order to run for the presidency. There is nothing wrong with that--a healthy ego is the ontological pre-condition for seeking political office.

Now is Obama wrong? Yes, because he made a tactical mistake: he let it slip.

But that is the paradox of the situation: we want someone to run for the elitest of the elite positions, but we also want someone who's just one of the guys.

Now, how someone feels about a group of people don't have to do with how they treat them. Just look at Johnson: the man was a racist, but he helped pass the most significant civil rights legislations since Reconstruction.

The Weekly 10 #8 (and some stuff on the War on Terror)

2008-04-14T22:00:00.001-07:00

It's back: get your blue tops/red-tops/yellow-tops/green-tops/WMD here.

1) Wu-Tang Clan - Can It All Be So Simple (from The 36 Chambers)
Has to be one of the best WTC songs of all time, which consequently puts it as one of the greatest raps songs of all time. What you get here is really a two-for-one special: the first half are verses by Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, two of the best MCs in the group; the second half is Ghost and Method Man introducing all the members and explaining their aliases. In other words: a song about origins.

2) The Magnetic Fields - Washington DC (from 69 Love Songs)
Lyrically, a tin-pan alley styled song. I would say that this song is cheesy if it weren't for the blatant irony. Also because I am going to DC next year.

3) John Adams - Landing of the Spirit of '76 (from Nixon in China)
This orchestral piece is part of a much longer opera about Nixon's historic visit to China. Chose it because of current political events surrounding China. Highly recommended that you check out the entire opera.

4) R.E.M. - I'm Gonna DJ (from Accelerate)
Don't call it a comeback! So sayeth LL Cool J. Not their best stuff, but surely better than their last three records. Short, to the point, simple chords, played loud and fast. Completely arena-rock, totally can imagine a stadium of people singing along, jumping up and down. Not sure if it's an act of celebration of life from a middle-aged band. Or if it's an act of desperation and refusing to deal with reality.

5) Bruce Springsteen - Girls in Their Summer Clothes (from Magic)
Another arena-rock song from an arena-rock warhorse. Chose it because of the hot weather the last couple of days, which saw a lot of girls in summer dresses. Also, not sure if The Boss is playing his old nostalgia trick again: either he's lamenting a state of affairs in America The Innocent, or he's just singing about shit that never existed to begin with. But again, the epic scope of its quaintness sort of makes the discussion irrelevant.

6) Nick Cave - Albert Goes West (from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!)
Pushing 60 and still making jokes about pussy ( Henry, he went south and lost his way deep in the weeping forests of Le Vulva). I have no idea what this song is about: is it some kind of metaphor for a quest, or just non-sense. But the guitar is loud, and there's even back vocals of "woo-woo." What more do you want?

7) George Benson - Shape of Things That Are and Were (from The Shape of Things to Come)
Before George Benson made wedding songs, he was actually a pretty decent jazz guitarist. Who'd thought? The bongos and the horns give this a Latin tinge mixed with soul/r&b.

8) Chet Baker - How Deep is the Ocean (from Chet's Choice)
This is a piece from late in his career, and there is nothing in the song itself that suggests that it's special, or that it occupies some special canonical position. I rather enjoy the song precisely because of Chet's tone, which is inimitable.

9) Philip Glass - Symphony No. 3, Third Movement (from Symphony No. 3)
Some people knock Glass, and minimalism in general, for being just primitive doodles repeated ad nauseum and sold to yuppies and petty bourgeoisie hungry for real art. And perhaps it's even true that I am one of those yuppies and petty bourgeoisie hungry for real art. But whatever the case, I rather like this movement. So the knocks are ignored for now.

10) MONO - Mere Your Pathetique Light (from their third album, whose title I'm too lazy to bother spelling out fully)
This really doesn't sound like a Steve Albini-produced album, which usually sounds dramatic and big, but this sounds more restrainted, even deliberatively, on purpose. More classically-oriented, more compositionally-leaning. The interaction between the violin, viola, cello, and the distorted guitar is excellent. A dichotomy and contrast between clean string-generated melodic lines and distortion-generated ones.

The War On Terror Talk

Now, onto more serious stuff. Today at Berkeley's Institute of International Studies, Professor Allen Weiner from the Stanford Law School gave a talk titled "It's the Law, Even in War." The talk was essentially about how the Bush administration's invocation of the "War on Terror" in a very real, legal sense, not rhetorically, as other invocations of war, such as the War on Drugs for example. The talk essentially examines what the legal invocation of war means, in terms of actually applying international law.

Aside from the intellectual curiosity which the topic excited in me, the other primary reason I attended the lecture was the promise of free lunch. I was not disappointed: wraps were provided, and they were decent.

From my notes, the talk essentially consisted of the following, which I shall try to break down in the most sensible way I can.

I. Invocation of War in the Legal Sense and Its Implications

Unlike previous "wars" which have been part of our political rhetoric, the Bush Administration speak of the War on Terror in a very concrete, explicit legal sense. In using the term War on Terror in a legal sense, the Administration is essentially calling upon international law governing war in order to justify certain actions
Examples of Actions:

Use of armed force
Killing of individual soldiers (Afghanistani troops) and operatives (Al Qaeda members)
Killing individuals outside of Afghanistan and Iraq

e.g., the killing of Al Qaeda operatives in Yeme and Somalia

Justification of detaining enemy combatants (Guantonomo)

Detainees are not held because of specific charges, but as a pre-emptive and preventive measure in order to remove them from any field of operation

Use of domestic surveillance (FISA)

None of these actions would be justifiable if the administration did not explicitly treat the War on Terror as an actual war in international law.

II. Is the War on Terror an Actual War under International Law?

Positivist View: no, because according to the letters of international law, war is defined as an armed conflict between nations. Clearly, Al Qaeda and terrorist groups do not constitute a nation; ergo, no war.
Functionalist View (one taken by the Bush Administration): yes, the War on Terror is war under international law, because of certain structural similarities

Capacity: Al Qaeda, as demonstrated by 9/11, has the capacity to inflict harm on the United States; in this regard, it holds similar capacities as regular state actors.
Party-Like: Al Qaeda is well-organized and highly structured

Principal-agency: Individual operatives are acting as the agents of commanders. Thus, they can be treated analogously like soldiers who are commanded by nations

Ideological: Al Qaeda's objectives are distinctly political, as opposed to economical or religious, which is analogous to ideological objectives held by nation states
Last-resort: America has used all non-violent diplomatic options, at far as Afghanistan was concerned.

III. Not the End of Inquiry, Part I

Passing the prima facie test: The Bush Administration's functionalist views seem to pass the prima facie test, but in reality, its logic is highly inconsistent

Source of inconsistency: In justifying its own powers, the Administration takes the much more expansive functionalist view. But in claiming what it owes to enemy combatants, the Administration takes the much more restricted positivist view.

Examples of Inconsistency

The scope of targets: the Administration has explicitly stated that the War on Terror does not only target Al Qaeda, but all terrorist groups, thus giving it a very expansive scope of targets

Inconsistency: International laws governing war has a much more restricted scope on who the targets are.

Rights of detainees: the Administration argues that detainees held at Guantonomo cannot claim rights-protection because they are not prisoners of war, since they are not part of a nation

Inconsistency: If this is the case, then continued military operations in Afghanistan is also impermissible, because we are no longer fighting a state actor, but terrorist groups

Status of detainees: the Administration claims that detainees captured during the Afghanistan operation are operatives of global terrorism

Inconsistency: the operation in Afghanistan has changed--it is no longer an armed conflict against another state, but a military operation against non-state actors. Therefore, the detainees captured during the Afghanistan operation should have been released or chaged

Issue of reciprocity: the Administration has charged individual operatives with the killing of American soldiers during course of combat

Inconsistency: International law states that once war is underway, combatants on both sides are to be treated as moral equals. Thus, there is no criminal charge against one combatant killing another in the course of war. However, the Administration does not recognize reciprocity.

IV. Not the End of Inquiry, Part 2

Room for Exception within the Geneva Convention?

Common Article 3 allows for some form of non-international conflict
Traditionally, this has been interpreted to mean things like intra-national conflicts, such as civil wars.

Supreme Court case law:

In Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantonomo were protected under the Geneva Convention--thus, the rejection of secret military tribunals

Not as rosy as it sounds: although the ruling of the Hamdan case seems to suggest that the Court is protecting the rights of detainees, it might end up legitimating the War on Terror as an actual war under international law.

The Interpretation of Common Article 3

The Court interpreted "non-international" not as most international lawyers have done, that is, treat it as civil war.

Rather, "non-international" is taken to mean conflict not between nations, which is a very literal, if somewhat counter-intuitive way of reading it. Under this interpretation, the War on Terror is an instance of "non-international" conflict since it is technically not between nations, which is what "international" literally means--between nations

However, this could potentially mean that the War on Terror is treated as an actual war under international law, albeit in this strange kind of fashion.

Thus, even if the ruling of Hamdan came out against the Administration, it might have ultimately legitimized the Administration's claim that the War on Terror is a legal war under international law

V. Toward a Checks-and-Balances System

Having possibly legitimized the Administration's claim to a legal war in Hamdan, it is now up to the Judiciary to delineate and clarify war powers.

Uphill battle: traditionally, the courts have hesitated to delineate executive powers out of judicial deference

A check on the unitary executive:

If the courts do not further clarify executive war powers that can be used in the War on Terror, the executive branch essentially goes unchecked
Legal questions: the courts must answer a series of questions in this untraditional war

With what "powers" is the United States at war with? The courts must specify the targets
What is the sufficient degree of connection between an individual and a "power" before he can be prosecuted?

For example, is it enough to prosecute him for merely being a member, or must he meet some further threshold?

Where the war powers are exercised?
How long the war will last

This entails questions about how this war can be ended, since traditional ways of ending a war, such as cease-fires and peace treaties, are not likely with terrorist groups

The unprecedented nature of the War on Terror calls upon an exercise of checks-and-balances, or else it leaves too much power in the hands of the executive.

VI. Personal Comments
Now, those are my notes on what Prof. Weiner has said: I tried to be as faithful to his words as I could, but it goes without saying that this is not an objective/factual account, but merely what I took him to be saying.

As for my personal thoughts, I felt he did a good job describing why the War on Terror poses so many legal problems due to its unprecedented nature. I felt that claim was backed up by a lot of examples in which the invocation of international law was inconsistent with the actual letters of international law. And this is inevitably the case, in my opinion, when one tries to apply existing laws to deal with an unprecedented situation in which existing laws were clearly not designed to do (I might have more to say on this in regards to Carl Schmitt, but that is for another day and time). Therefore, at this crucial juncture in which all the rules, laws, and norms are still being tested and formulated, it is absolutely paramount that a variety of actors, such as legislators, judges, citizens, other nations, international organizations, etc., participate in this formation-process in order to create a set of rules and norms that are viewed as legitimate and credible.

Part of the problem, at least so it looks to me, with the Administration's invocation of war in the legal sense, is precisely that it was done so unilaterally. All one has to do is to read John Yoo's memos to realize that the Administration was only concerned about itself, not other actors. Thus, I find Prof. Weiner's normative conclusions compelling, because it is simply bad policy to leave the formation of important laws like these in the hands of only one governmental branch and only one relevant actor among the possible many. If the War on Terror is to have any legitimacy at all, it has to be governed by rules and norms that are viewed as legitimate.

FREE CHINA!!!

2008-04-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

Alright, here's my final (I promise) thoughts on the whole Tibet-Olympics-China controversy.

Like I said previously, the reasons behind the protests are legitimate--I do not deny that. China has had a less-than-stellar human rights record, and anyone who honestly gives a damn about human rights have a more than legitimate reason to protest.

Having said that, I see a potential danger in these protests: that is, the protesters have a tendency to equate the Chinese GOVERNMENT with the Chinese NATION.

I just want to say that those two are not one and the same. I love China the NATION, but not the GOVERNMENT that rules it.

So from that perspective, I feel very bad that the games are now tainted for the Chinese people, who really don't care (or can't do anything about) the Chinese government. Why should ordinary Chinese people have to suffer the consequences? After all, they were not personally responsible for the oppression in Tibet. They weren't the ones in tanks running over students at Tiananmen Square. And they damn sure did not jail journalists and bloggers personally.

So again I ask: why should ordinary Chinese citizens suffer the consequences? They are not identical with the government. And they really can't do all that much about the government, since lest anyone forget, the Chinese government is an authoritarian one.

I mean, how would you feel if people from other countries took a shit all over an event of national pride, and all for something which you were not personally responsible for and could do nothing about? How the fuck would YOU feel about that?

But you might say: that may be true, but that is the price that must be paid, and that price is paying for a better and freer China. Oh yeah? How the fuck so? Do you honestly think that boycotting the opening ceremonies will really pressure China into loosening its grip on Tibet, or force the Chinese government to completely divest in Sudan?

Sure, Gordon Brown and George Bush might score political points back home for grand-standing, for supposedly "standing up" for human rights and democracy and liberty, all the while granting China most favored nation status, including it in the WTO, and happily trading with China.

To me, if the West is really serious about pressuring China into reforming its human rights records, it should put its money where its fucking mouth is: strip China of most favored nation status, exclude it from the WTO, and stop importing from China.

But answer me this honestly: can you ever see that happening? Hell fucking no.

Because at the end of the day, after the political grand-standing is over, nothing will have really changed: Tibet fades from the 24 hours news cycle, the Chinese government continues to rule with an iron fist, the West continues to do business with China, and all those smug/complacent protesters in San Francisco will continue to not know where Tibet is on a fucking map!!

So while everyone else wins, who's the real loser? That's right--ordinary Chinese people; ordinary Chinese people who have to live year after year in an authoritarian government.

I mean, we talk about "liberating" the oppressed; well, why not free China?

I guess I'm so riled up (more so than I have been for a while) precisely because amidst all the political rhetoric, the protests and the violence, the grand-standing for human rights, no one ever thinks about what the ordinary Chinese citizen might be affected.

A nation is not only an abstract concept, not the same as its government, but rather, a nation is A PEOPLE, and right now, the Chinese people are the loser in this chest-puffing exercise. And as a Chinese person, that really pisses me the fuck off.

FREE CHINA!!!!

More on China

2008-04-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

I felt that some things were left unsaid in my entry yesterday on the Olympic scandal involving China. What were left unsaid are my broader thoughts on China as a whole.

Despite the fact that I have been an American citizen for more than six years, I cannot deny the fact that I spent 11 years of my life growing up in China. To some degree, China is still my homeland, and one can never forget one's home. As such, I still identify with Chinese people, and consider myself linked to the place. In some ways, I grew up with China, in the sense that my coming of age coincided with tremendous growth and expansion in China itself.

Therefore, I can't help but be conflicted over the state of modern China. On the one hand, I am immensely proud of the fact that China has brought more people out of poverty in a shorter amount of time than any other nation has ever done in history.

On the other hand, I cannot endorse the policies made by the Chinese government. True, the Communist Party may have been partially responsible for China's economic growth, but as someone with parents who lived through the Tiananmen Square massacre, I am confronted with this legacy of authoritarian repression.

But therein lies the rub: when is the cost of economic development too high? Is repression a necessary price to bring people out of poverty and modernize the most populous country on earth?

On this point I have no clear answers whatsoever. Modernization has historically always been accompanied by drastic social and political upheaval, but how much is too much? I have no idea. Maybe it's a case of can't having your cake and eating it too, but if this is indeed the case, then I also have no idea which side I'm on: liberty first, or welfare first.

I can only hope that after a period of economic development and modernization, Chinese people will finally be able to have some meaningful political liberties. But this is not an inevitable destination, and therein lies the uncertainty.

Politics of an Olympic Proportion

2008-04-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Quite frankly, I don't even know what to think about the whole political controversy that has arisen recently over the Olympic Torch's passing through San Francisco.

Apparently, the torch relay's route was changed on the fly, thus messing up the plans of both protesters and supporters.

Like I said, I am conflicted. On the one hand, it is undeniable that China has a less-than-stellar human rights record on Tibet and Darfur, not to mention its own internal repression of dissenters and anyone whom the Communist Party perceives as a potential threat to its rule. Thus, from a purely moral point of view, I think the protesters have every right to protest and call for boycotts.

On the other hand, however, I feel bad, as someone who was born in Beijing, that what should have been a proud event is now tainted by the political mess. Because after all, it is in fact a big deal for Chinese citizens that the Olympic Games will be held in China. Their wanting the Games to happen does not indicate their support for the Communist Party's policies. In fact, they really have no say in Party policy to begin with. They just want the Games to go on.

But unfortunately, the 2008 Olympics will now probably always be remembered for the political controversy that it has engendered, rather than as the first Olympic Games that China has ever held.

Soylent Green Is People! A Philosophical Reflection on Cannibalism

2008-04-07T22:28:00.000-07:00

With the passing of Charlton Heston, he of the Ten Commandments, The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, Spartacus, and a hilarious cameo in Michael Moore's Bowling Columbine, no one is left to proclaim that "Soylent Green is people!"

Which got me thinking: why the ethical prohibition against cannibalism?

Some immediate responses come to mind. First, it's disgusting, at least for most people, I think. Second, there might be good medical/scientific reasons not to eat human meat. But these kind of reasons are what I call emotional and prudential reasons against cannibalism.

What I am interested in is a non-consequentialist account for why we are not allowed to eat other humans.

And by eating other humans I don't mean eating them on a regular basis, as a substitution for other kind of meat. Rather, I mean to find a non-consequentialist account for prohibiting the eating of human meat, even under the most dire circumstances, such as when no other forms of sustenance can be found.

An analogy can be made with regards to killing other people: we do not condone killing other on a regular basis, but there are instances, such as war, or self-defense, in which killing others is justified. What I am trying to find is if there are such instances in which cannibalism can be justified.

In the end, I can't find a good reason why we shouldn't eat human beings if human beings is all there is left to eat. Of course, there would have to be a whole bunch of conditions that must be satisfied before this can happen. For example, we'd have to make sure that no foul play was involved, that the person who is being eaten died of natural causes. Second, we'd have to make sure that there are in fact no other sources of sustenance for the survivors. Third, we'd have to be fairly confident that if the deceased is not eaten, the survivors, who are otherwise innocent, will die.

If these conditions are satisfied, I see no reason why the survivors should not eat the deceased. Sure, it might be physically revolting to any spectators, but I don't think emotional repulsion or disgust is a strong enough basis for moral condemnation.

This conclusion is not even really aimed at the survivors, because they might decide after all not to eat the deceased. But this is aimed more toward the observers, who might feel the need to punish the cannibalists for this alleged moral transgression.

What is Wrong with Alienation?

2008-04-04T23:36:00.000-07:00

A conversation I had at dinner today prompted some reflection: namely, what is wrong with alienation?

By alienation I mean the feeling of estrangement/detachment/non-identification from your chosen profession. I only use the context of occupation because this is the topic that came up in this conversation: that is, what is wrong with working at a job which you feel alienated?

My interlocutor made a normative claim by saying that alienation is to be avoided as much as possible, and that one should try to find a line of work that one likes, or perhaps even love, so that life can be richer and more meaningful.

After thinking about this for a while, I can't really say that I agree, and the reasons for my disagreement has to do with some more foundational issues.

First, I would argue that alienation, as a concrete phenomenon, is ontologically inevitable. Speaking from a strictly probabilistic perspective, the number of people who want to find jobs that they are not alienated from far exceeds the number of jobs available. Therefore, for any given person in question, the chances of his finding a non-alienated occupation is not that great.

Second, I would also argue that behind the normative claim that alienation ought to be avoided lies a metaphysical conception of the individual as an unity. This assumption of metaphysical unity I also disagree with, because I think it is fictitious. There is nothing biological or physical in being human that suggests that existence is an unified phenomenon. There is also no metaphysical basis for making a claim for unity, since I don't believe that a singular, stable identity across-time exists for a person: the "Michael" of today is certainly to my mind not the "Michael" of ten years ago. Therefore, a person's metaphysical identity is a lot more fluid than a claim of unity would suggest. Furthermore, psychology has shown that an individual can hold contradictory thoughts, have self-doubt and scepticism, and in certain cases, self-loathing. All of this suggests that the idea of an unified metaphysical identity for a person is fictitious; therefore, alienation is probably a persistent metaphysical feature of personhood.

Furthermore, to assume that alienation in the occupational setting ought to be avoided assumes that professional occupation makes up a large part of, if it is not identical to, personal identity. Again, this assumption seems to me to be unwarranted: one could have a day job that one does not particular like, but one does not necessarily have to form his entire identity upon that occupation; one could form an identity based on things outside of work. And if we are to take seriously the ontological claim that alienation is a probable outcome given the gap between the number of people looking for non-alienated jobs and the number of actual jobs available, then perhaps it is even advisable for people to NOT form an identity based on professional occupation if the integrity of person-hood is valued.

Third, even if one puts aside the ontological and metaphysical considerations for now, it is not the case, at least not an obvious one, that alienation ought to be avoided. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that individuals harbor contradictory thoughts and values, and those who learn to control that tension learns self-mastery. Hence, the existence of alienation can potentially teach one how to rise above the tension and learn to control it. One could even say that this tension is creative, in the sense that it allows the individuals to identity with different and/or conflicting parts of himself under different circumstances for different reasons. If it is possible to create great art out of irreconcilable tensions, then it is not impossible that a great, rich, dynamic life could not be lived in a state of alienation.

Fourth, the normative claim that alienation ought to be avoided as much as possible makes the unwarranted assumption that the only reason to do certain things is simply that we identity with those actions. This seems to me to be blatantly untrue. Sometimes, and most of the time even, we do things not because we identify wholeheartedly, or even less-than-wholeheartedly, with those actions, but because we are compelled out of necessity. And by necessity I do not mean some kind of metaphysical necessity, but rather practical necessity. Acting out of practical necessity, at least to me, does negate individual will and autonomy, since we are ultimately the necessary causal agents. Moreover, we could act a certain way not because we feel truly identified with that action, but because we want to act well. For example, I have no particular identification to playing chess, because I do not see myself as a "chess player" in any meaningful way, but I nonetheless try to play chess to the best of my ability because what motivates me is not the identification with chess-playing, but the pursuit of virtuosity and excellence. It's like Bob Dylan says: you do what you must and you do it well.

So, after thinking about this, I can only conclude that my friend's original normative claim does not hold up, because there is nothing in the concept of professional/occupational alienation that suggests that one cannot lead an interesting, rich, and meaningful existence.

Rather, what this conversation reveals to me is how we, as Americans, are deeply attached to our professional occupations--to the extent that we cannot conceive of a meaningful existence without some kind of identification to our jobs. To me, our inability to envision a meaningful life without identifying with our jobs simply reveals our Protestant/Capitalist cultural background, which says something much more powerful about Americans than it does about alienation.

In the Presence of Greatness: The Saxophone Colossus

2008-04-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

Man, I can finally die in peace now: I have just seen Sonny Rollins perform live.

I can't quite believe this: it's fucking Sonny Rollins, a living jazz legend, one of the last. Once he and Ornette Coleman dies, all the jazz legends of the previous generation will have died.

He's one of the last, and to have heard him perform and rock the shit of the tenor sax is a privilege to say the least. I mean, if you talk about Sonny Rollins, you are talking about one of the greatest sax players of all time--he's up there with Charlie Parker and Coltrane. If you look at whom he has recorded or played with, you are essentially listing a who's who of jazz in the 20th century: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Thelonius Monk, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, and John Coltrane.

I mean, damn, just look at that list of names: I can't even imagine hearing all those guys live at their peaks, let alone perform with them!

Yet even after all those legends died, Sonny Rollins is still standing, but who knows for how long. That is why when I first heard that he was coming to Berkeley, I told myself that I would go to that show, come hell or high water. There was no way in fucking hell I was going to miss that show.

And it did not disappoint. In fact, it rocked my world and blew my mind.

To state it simply: the man still got it, after all these years. Still got it, the liquidity, the pyrotechnics, the tone, the improvisational genius. I was in a trance for two hours, and after it was over, I barely felt any passage of time. I wanted more, I wanted Sonny Rollins all night, all day, everyday.

I can't believe that a 77 year old man can still rock so fucking hard for two hours. Sonny was looking decidedly gangster as he made his entrance: all black attires, hair and beard grey with a tinge of white, and rocking a pair of shades. Yes, a pair of shades at night, indoors. But you know what, he made it work.

He looks physically weak, as he was almost wobbling across the stage, back bent slightly, keeping time by snapping his fingers, directing his band, and in a particularly joyous moment, after finishing a soulful solo, turned toward the audience and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: Hey, I don't know what I'm doing, but what I sure as hell am having fun rocking your world and melting faces.

And his voice belies his tone: his voice is gravel, a slightly cracked deep baritone, but man oh man is his tone smooooooth and fluid, dynamic, always changing, but also capable of firework when he feels like it.

This is why I love live music, especially live music performed by a fucking genius: you can just see it, the music is flowing through him, like he's the gateway to some absolutely transcendentally sublime shit. He lives through the music because he's just blowing wild and free, but yet exerting fine and subtle control, totally belying his age and physical condition. Like Nietzsche says, the artist simply becomes the manifestation of some hidden beauty, himself a canvass upon which this beautiful, otherwise hidden, is projected and made visible to the audience.

I think my friend Pat put it the best after coming out of the show: He just blew my mind, and now I don't know what to do with myself.

HRC's Dubious (and Hilarious) Rocky Analogy

2008-04-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

HRC has compared herself to Rocky Balboa while on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania lately, the analogy being that she too, like Rocky, is viewed as a underdog, long-shot fighter.

It's a nice analogy, except for the part where it is not an analogy at all. Or, at the least, it's not an analogy that I, if I were her campaign manager, would advise her to make.

Lest anyone forget, Rocky ultimately loses to Apollo Creed in the first movie. So for a minute, just forget the subtle racial undertone at play (a underdog, long-shot white guy fighting against the perceived favorite, who is black), and think about a little thing called factual accuracy.

Why would HRC want to compare herself to Rocky, who even though he fought valiantly and to the end, loses nonetheless? And if this analogy is supposed to work, then who the hell is HRC's Adrian?

Unless I am totally wrong, and what HRC really meant was that she's just like Rocky, but not the Rocky of Rocky I, but Rocky IV, in which Rocky beast Drago and single-handedly ends the Cold War by giving the people of the USSR a rousing speech that goes like this:

"if I can change... and you can change... everybody can change!"

Ha, except this analogy also breaks down, for two reasons. First, Obama is being framed as the eloquent speaker in this little narrative, not HRC. Second, the theme of "change" is again not HRC's, but Obama's.

So no matter which way you want to put it, the Rocky analogy simply does not work. And it's a stupid analogy to begin with. There is no Adrian for HRC if she loses.

What Does Loyalty Have to Do with Anything?

2008-04-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

Hilarious op-ed posts from the Washington Post from both Bill Richardson and James Carville on Richardson's endorsement of Obama for president, with both people sniping at each other.

But what strikes me as interesting is Carville's assertion that loyalty is a cardinal political virtue:

I believe that loyalty is a cardinal virtue. Nowhere in the world is loyalty so little revered and tittle-tattle so greatly venerated as in Washington. I was a little-known political consultant until Bill Clinton made me. When he came upon hard times, I felt it my duty -- whatever my personal misgivings -- to stick by him.

To me, this sounds incredibly naive. Of all people, James Carville should know that famous Washington cliche: no permanent friends, only permanent interests.

Loyalty is only a virtue if you are loyal to the person who's going to win--that is certainly not the most likely case with HRC's campaign, now that the Democratic leadership is calling on the superdelegates to follow whichever candidate has the most popular pledge votes.

Meaning: short of divine intervention, Obama would end up with the most popular pledged votes.

This accusation of "disloyalty" seems too convenient, after all, as Bill Richardson's own op-ed in the Post points out:

Do the people now attacking me recall that I ran for president, albeit unsuccessfully, against Sen. Clinton? Was that also an act of disloyalty?

Those schooled in the game should know that blind loyalty is a political liability, and Bill Richardson is doing no more than what any politician would try to do: he is trying to curry favor with the most likely Presidential candidate of his own party. Would things be different if HRC and Obama switched places? That's hard to say, but any politician would be incredibly stupid if he doesn't try to curry favor with the most likely candidate.

In this Bill Richardson is no more better or worse than any other politician: he gambled on the best calculation he could muster. If it works out, he probably gets a position within the Obama administration; if not, then surely the Clinton people will not give him anything. I cannot imagine that an experienced politician like Richardson does not know what kind of risk he's taking.

So I find it hypocritical for Carville to play the disloyalty card. Sure, he took a calculated risk too: if HRC does end up becoming president, his loyalty will be remembered. But there is no such thing as permanent loyalty in a constantly shifting environment.

Loyalty comes at a price, and all political actors with Machiavellian virtu surely knows the price.

But that, as Omar says in The Wire, is all in the game.

Frank Rich Strikes Again!

2008-03-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought the world is safe from the inane, retarded bullshit spewed by the gaping asshole that is Frank Rich, he strikes back, come from the dead, like a zombie that refuses to be killed no matter how many times you've shot its head with a 12 gauge. He's like the Rasputin of the newspaper columnists: you can belittle, ridicule, and ridicule him again, but every time he rises, like a very resistant case of the herpes.

Okay, the previous paragraph is of course a very hyperbolic, and let me add, unfair, assessment of Frank Rich. He's not a gaping asshole that spews retarded bullshit: he is the merely the orifice from which unholy things emerge.

But seriously, I don't personally know the guy, so I am just busting his balls a little bit (or a lot). I do, however, have a huge problem with the way he writes, especially about the way he writes about Hillary Clinton. Now look here, I am not going to vote for her, but I really think Frank Rich has got it in for her.

As if writing an op-ed column in which he compared HRC's campaign management to Bush's management of the Iraq war is not enough (see my response here), Frank Rich decides to write a column in today's New York Times, trying to rip HRC a new one about her "gaffe" about the whole "dodging sniper bullets in Bosnia" story.

The title of the op-ed column?: "Hillary's St. Patrick's Day Massacre."

If I didn't know any better, or maybe it's because I do, I think Frank Rich is trying very hard to replace Maureen Dowd as the NYT columnist with the most amount of "snark."

The other thing about Frank Rich is that he is predictable, very predictable, especially when it comes to making exaggerated claims of comparison. Check out this claim in his column:

Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.”

I honestly don't know how in the fucking world Frank Rich can justify HRC's story with "propaganda." Again Frank Rich tries to argue, with all the subtlety of a motor-impaired alcoholic wielding a hammer in a china shop, that HRC is just like Bush. How in the fucking world can anyone equate the Jessica Lynch spin-job and "Mission Accomplished" with a fictitious story that HRC told on her campaign stops?

Like Jules used to say in Pulp Fiction: "It ain't even the same fucking sport."

The broader point about the whole "incident" with HRC's Bosnia story is that we are still very firmly attached to the teat that is the 24 hours news cycle. Just like the Rev. Wright's remarks were played over and over again on cable and youtube, HRC's gaffe was being played over and over again now.

And that, friends, is the state of election coverage in this country. Now that Obama speech is brought back into sharp focus, especially when he says:

I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

He's fucking right: who really cares if HRC told a lie about Bosnia? What the fuck does that have to do with anything about being the president? Does lying automatically disqualify you from being the president? If that is the case, then no one in America today is fit to run for that office, ever. What is the discussion about HRC's lie really about? Because God help me, I can't see that it has anything to do with a real meaningful discussion about her being the next president.

And that is the thing: we have become so fucking petty in our view on politics.

But who the fuck am I kidding right? After two more days, HRC's little Bosnia story blows over in the news cycle, and we will all soon be watching some little stupid mistake that John McCain has made on YouTube, and all the talking heads (and here I am reminded of a great couplet from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without motion") will be arguing themselves to death and oblivion about whether the obligatory "apology," the inevitable "renounce-and-denounce" speech served its political purpose of appeasing the so-called "controversy."

Don't you just love American political coverage by the media?

But lest y'all be confused: I, too, am guilty, and no less guilty than Frank Rich and others like him. After all, if it wasn't for the fact that I check all the major newspapers and political blogs every morning when I wake up, between every break I have from work, then I would not be able to write the things that I do.

I, too, am a complicit actor and spectator of this theatre of the absurd, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Voting as a Problematic Expression of "Freedom"?

2008-03-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

I meant to write about this post over at Crooked Timber a while ago, a post about the coercive elements in voting and its moral justification (or possibly its lack thereof).

I suddenly remembered that particular post when I was reading some Hannah Arendt for my political philosophy class. The assigned reading is from the fourth chapter of Arendt's book Between Past and Future, titled "What is Freedom?" This book explores the traditional concepts often associated with political philosophy, such as freedom, justice, responsibility, etc., and tries to show that our traditional understandings of them have become increasingly in tension with contemporary reality. As you can see from the title of the chapter, Arendt was concerned with the notion of freedom as understood from a political perspective.

Reading that particular chapter reminded me of something that Harry Brighouse, who wrote in his original blog post that

voting, whether in a referendum or in a representative election, usually involves attempting to wield coercive power over others, and that many of those others are non-consenting.

Brighouse than goes on to say that just because voting is a form of coercive behavior does not automatically mean that any and all form of coercion is morally unjustifiable. It is an interesting argument, and it raises many questions which challenge the normal American conception of voting as a fundamental expression of political freedom.

However, what I am interested in is not the normative aspects (although those are certainly interesting, and warrants its own post, if I ever get around to putting down my thoughts). What interests me is that Brighouse doesn't seem to think that the fact that voting is essentially coercive behavior is problematic--to me, he seems to take it for granted, something to be mentioned only in order to move on to his normative work.

To be fair to Brighouse, I know that his intention is to focus on the normative aspects of voting, but since I am reading Arendt, I can't help but think that there is something problematic with the liberal conception of "freedom."

The problem, or at least the tension, is this: in liberal political thought, especially American liberal political thought, voting is the fundamental expression of freedom, if not identical with freedom itself. After all, voting is seen as the only fair and legitimate way for individual citizens to express their political opinions and try to enact their political goals.

But I agree with Brighouse, because there is something very coercive about voting, at least voting in the American political system. And this coercive nature of voting comes from another pillar of liberal thought: the social contract, as seen in Locke's writings. Locke was the one who wrote that the social contract is binding in a way that the body politic moves with the majority, and the minority moves along with it, and that so long as the decision-making procedures are fair (reasonable availabilities for participation, equality of voting, etc), then the social contract binds the minority to move along with the majority.

So where exactly does this leave room for freedom? After all, if there are 100 members in a political community, and 51 of them votes one way, 49 votes the other way, then the 49 are being coerced by the 51. Or even worse, the 49 are really being coerced by 2, since it is only those last 2 votes which are decisive. There is no real meaningful sense in which the 49 members who voted the other way are "free," unless everyone acknowledges that whatever decisions made by the majority are binding upon everyone in the community. But again, why should that be the case? Why should the majority simply be obeyed because they are the majority? (To see a more extended, and more radical argument in this vein, check out Robert Paul Wolff's short book titled In Defense of Anarchism).

The only meaningful freedom under this kind of political regime is at the moment of the regime's creation: that is to say, when everyone in the community was free to participate in the regime and negotiate its operating terms. But once that moment is over, the members are bound by that regime. Sure, they can vote, but voting then becomes not an exercise in freedom, but an exercise in luck, because you don't know which side you will come out on. Sure, you can try to persuade, build coalitions, or use other political maneuvers to increase the chance of your side being the winning one, but this is not guaranteed at all. And this is not to even mention that a lot of people simply don't vote, and are denied even this very limited sense of freedom.

This kind of freedom is problematic with our usual understanding of freedom in the liberal sense: that is to say, freedom as sovereignty. In this kind of political regime, it is hard to see how individual freedom is individual sovereignty when the method of participation (voting) is essentially coercive. It is very difficult, at least for me, to see how an individual on the losing side can be "sovereign."

But my main concern is not normative: I am not here to argue that any one conception of freedom is better than any other (at least not in this entry anyways). I am merely pointing out that the traditional liberal conception of freedom as sovereignty is problematic, or at least in tension with, the liberal tenet of voting as the expression of that freedom. Because the result, as I have tried to argue, is that only those whose votes end up in the majority are sovereign, while the minority are deprived of their sovereignty.

Thus, as I am inclined to agree with Arendt, the problem of freedom is such a huge problem in liberal political thought precisely because of this built-in tension between freedom in the abstract and freedom in practice in liberal political regimes defined by voting.

The choice is to either keep doing this philosophical dance, or to start over and try to come up with a new notion of political freedom that jives more with our political realities.

The War is Back

2008-03-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking last week that it seemed strange that, after five years, the war was surprisingly receiving little (at least compared to 2007) play in the media.

But then this week, it looks like the war is back on the news cycle, precipitated by the Maliki government's decision to launch a heavy assault on the Shiite militia. The Administration is spinning this as a sign of political independence, as this offensive was supposedly entirely coordinated by the Maliki government.

Which begs the question: if this is entirely the effort of the Maliki government, why are American forces involved? I clearly remember administration officials' singing a different tune last year, when they were all saying that American troops should not play sides in a sectarian conflict.

Over at Crooked Timber, there are a couple of pretty good analysis of the Basra offensive (here and here), taking a deeper look at the political motivations behind the offensive. In short: Maliki needed to show his cards, or at least try to call a bluff on the militias, by launching this offensive in order to show that his government can try to do something even as the troop surge is set to expire, and the next president, whoever that is, will probably start withdrawing troops. Or, alternatively, it could be just a play to get continued American commitment.

Congressional Puff Pieces

2008-03-27T16:24:00.000-07:00

My job at Maplight.org. is to research who supports and who opposes federal legislation, and then to find out how various special interest groups' position on legislation dictate their campaign contributions to members of Congress who voted either yes or no on that bill.

So today, this bill comes down the pipeline into my assigned cue, and I just had to laugh, because my God, what a puff piece. This legislation (S. 720), titled "Army Specialist Joseph P. Micks Federal Flag Code Amendment Act of 2007," amends title 4 of the US Code to

"to authorize the Governor of a State, territory, or possession of the United States to order that the National flag be flown at half-staff in that State, territory, or possession in the event of the death of a member of the Armed Forces from that State, territory, or possession who dies while serving on active duty."

If you actually read the bill, you will find out that it doesn't do or say anything that is remotely meaningful. After all, what does it really do: it allows a governor of any US territories to fly the flag at half-staff if a solider from that territory died on active duty.

Well, boo-fucking-hoo.

Don't get me wrong, I think that giving soldiers who died on active duty their due respect is a morally legitimate thing to do. But to make a law out of it? And a puff legislation at that? That is just ridiculous.

This bill is constructed in a way that no one can possibly be opposed to it, because to do so is to be called unpatriotic. But how exactly is enacting such a law truly patriotic? This is a blatant piece of manipulative, self-masturbatory law that is designed for no other purpose than for its sponsors and co-sponsors to go back to their districts and states and puff up their chests and say that they "really respect the sacrifices that our brave men and women have made while serving in the line of duty."

Anyone who has done some research into how Congress, especially the Senate, works, realizes after a while that the Senate really doesn't do that much, but whatever little work that Senators do end up consisting of puff piece legislations like this.

I recommend this video which hilariously explains just how little Congress actually works:

Lost in Translation: American Political Theory in Chinese

2008-03-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

It is hilarious to me how Chinese people my family's generation do not really have any grasp of the fundamental workings of the American political system. This became really apparent to me when I tried to explain, to both my family and their friends, what kind of jobs I am looking for after graduation, since with their good intentions, they wanted to know so they can ostensibly help me look for jobs.

But it soon became very very obvious to me that Chinese people really don't have a concept for "civil society," at least as it's understood in American political theory as this intermediary layer between private citizens and traditional state apparatuses. Chinese people of my family's generation have no such concept, and why should they, since a broadly Confucian political theory has no analogous concept.

When I try to explain to them that I'm looking for jobs at NGOs, they are always confused. So are you working for the government, they always ask? When I tell them no, they ask if I'm working for a corporation or a for-profit company. When I tell them no, they have this confused look on their face, because they don't have a concept for organizations that are neither state institutions nor for-profit private companies.

This confusion has really given me some insight as to why Asian Americans tend to be politically very inactive compared other minority groups in America. After all, how could they be politically active if they do not understand the fundamental and critical roles that civil society interest groups play in American politics? To them, there is no such concept as a "civil society" in the Western sense, because it doesn't exist in Confucian political theory. There is no intermediary between the state and individuals in Confucian political thought, and certainly in Chinese politics today the idea of "interest groups" do not really have a lot of purchase.

Sometimes I wish I would have just applied to law school so that when these people ask, I can say that I'm going to law school. And they would probably smile and congratulate me...

That is, until I tell them that I really don't want to be a lawyer that goes to trial, at which point they will be confused again, because to Chinese people of an older generation, they can't imagine a lawyer who doesn't go to court, but who is instead a player in the policy process.

But what can you huh: it's all lost in translation.

On the Use and Abuse of Truth

2008-03-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

One question must be asked: what is the value of truth?

It all started recently with the revelation that a couple of well-known memoirs turned out to be fake, and there was a huge outcry among the media. But that puzzles me: after all, what does it matter, if it matters at all, that these memoirs are fake?

To me, these "fakes" only matter from a legal point of view: they mislead their publishers by selling the publishers stories which they did not create. But that is about it. Would there even be a controversy if these people simply told these stories without selling them?

Which brings me to the question at the beginning: of what value is the truth?

What is exactly wrong with making stuff up, if you are not doing it for the wrong kind of motives, i.e., to make money in an illegal way, to manipulate others and ultimately harming them, etc.

In other words: can one lie in a good way?

I think the answer is yes, because ultimately I am a pragmatic person. And as such, I will cite William James in The Varieties of Religious Experiences and say that if a fiction is needed in order for some people to live a better life, then so be it.

Then what ultimately matters is what kind of stories we make up and tell to others. This is why I am not ultimately opposed to mythologizing and telling narratives. I am with Nietzsche on this: sometimes society needs a myth in order to be life-affirming. Sure, the Founding Fathers were less than perfect than their words in the Constitution: they owned slaves, legalized the slave trade, but why should those FACTS matter if we are truly serious about pursuing equality and liberty?

All I'm trying to say is that stories matter, especially stories we tell about ourselves, because they constitute who we are in part. Sure, there are stories which are harmful, like Nazi stories about Aryan superiority. But that is only to say that that particular story is harmful, not that all stories are harmful. If society has a myth about peace, equality, freedom and establish those values as national values to be pursued, then I see no reason why those stories should be discredited simply because they are not the "truth."

In fact, it is precisely because I know what actually happened that makes me value narratives and myths MORE. I know America has had a less than stellar record of treating its people equally, of granting all of its citizens liberty, of not living up to its professed ideals. But the knowledge of that, that is precisely what makes me appreciate the founding myths of America: the stories about the pursuit of liberty and equality.

Lying is a fundamental characteristic of America: Americans are obsessed with self-invention, to get rid of past histories, to create a new identity in a new place. Whether it's John Winthrop saying that America must be a city upon a hill, or Gatsby's reinventing himself into a capitalist--it's all the same to me. The fact that many self-inventions and reinventions end tragically does not diminish my appreciation of the act.

This is not to say that the truth has no value; far from it, truth is valuable, but not in ALL circumstances. All I'm saying is that there can be good reasons for deliberately deviating from the truth.

It's really easy to look at a story and do research and claim that the story is not 100 percent accurate--that is really easy. Anyone can say that something is not true, but it take an artist to lie in a way that makes life interesting, and ultimately, better.

The Weekly 10 #7

2008-03-23T02:21:00.000-07:00

A little early this week, because I'm leaving on Sunday afternoon to fly to DC for my job interview.

So click here for the DL.

1) Billie Holiday - They Can't Take That Away From Me (from Body and Soul)
By the time this album was recorded, Billie Holiday's voice was pretty much shot (at least compared to her voice in the 30s and 40s) because of too much drug and liquor. But like Brian once said on Family Guy: no junk, no soul. And I think her voice here is extremely soulful, making up for her lost power. Personally, I think Billie Holiday's interpretation of this standard song is more pessimistic than most interpretations, and that is refreshing. And the accompanying players are also very good: check out Ben Webster's sax solo in the middle.

2) Duke Ellington - Prelude to a Kiss (from Duke's Big 4)
Again, when this album was recorded, the Duke was already pretty old, but I am a fan of Duke's small combo recordings just as much as his big band days. And his supporting cast is all excellent: Joe Pass on guitar, Ray Brown on bass, and Louis Bellson on drums. Duke can obviously still play the keys, and I really love how the song starts with Joe Pass' quiet guitar intro.

3) Ghostface Killah (featuring Raekwon) - Kilo (from Fishscale)
I never understood what Raewkon was rapping about in the last verse of this song when he's talking about different kinds of colored tops. But after watching The Wire, it totally made sense. This song is hilarious, especially the chorus: all around the world today, the kilo is a measure. As two of the best MCs in the Wu Tang Clan, Ghost and Rae do not disappoint.

4) John Coltrane - I Want to Talk About You (from Live at Birdland)
The best part of this song is at the end, when 'Trane is just going wild by himself, going up and down the scale, just blowing like a wild man. But before that, it starts out sounding like a ballad, but by the end, the fireworks are going off.

5) Miles Davis - Love Me or Leave Me (from Walkin')
The last cut on the album is a good indication of Miles' apparent move in the hard bop direction after this album. As always, a good Miles cut is probably worth more than whole lotta other shit combined.

6) Muddy Waters - I'm Ready (from Fathers and Sons)
In tongue-in-cheek fashion, let me advance a theory that says that all blues originate from not getting laid. Just listen to this song and tell me that you don't think this is about Muddy Water's singing that he can't get any. Well, you can't. Anyways, I love this song because it is so energetic, featuring Muddy Waters' booming voice and an exciting electric guitar and harmonica solos at the end. This song makes me want to move to Chicago, drink too much gin for my own good, and start a fucking fight.

7) OutKast - B.O.B. (from Stankonia)
This week marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, so what better way to celebrate (or not) than a song whose abbreviation stands for Bombs over Baghad. Ostensibly, the song has nothing to do with Iraq or Baghad, but it just sounds cool. Listening to OutKast makes me lament the state of modern hip hop: just think, it wasn't THAT long ago when creative hip hop like OutKast had commercial success and critical acclaim.

8) Philip Glass - The Grid (from Koyaanisqatsi)
Is there anyone who has not seen Koyaanisqatsi? Well if you haven't, I highly recommend it. This song is matched to that part of the movie that captures the modern American city, with its people and cars going in extremely quick motion.

9) Pornosonic - Cramming for College (from Pornosonic: Unreleased 70s Porno Music)
Someone hipped me to this on a forum, and I have to say that this is hilarious shit. Apparently Pornosonic made a bunch of adult-film music in the 70s, but due to various copyright hurdles, they were not released till now. This album is so campy and cheesy that it's good: after all, how could you not love the album cover? In this specific track, Ron Jeremy has a voice-over intro, which is campy enough on its own. As for the song itself, it sounds like a mixture of Sly and the Family Stone and music on the Stax label, what with the horns, scratchy guitar riffs and all.

10) Portishead - The Rip (from Third)
Portishead's third album has been leaked, and I couldn't resist. "The Rip" starts out with a theremin and gentle guitar plucking. Soon enough Beth Gibbon's voice comes in, and it sounds like it's been processed with some reverb. The song remains pretty minimalist until about halfway in, the percussion and the synthesizer come in. So there is both an element of lo-fi and more produced style mixed in this song, which I would say is emblematic of the album as a whole.

Gilgamesh: Becoming Human

2008-03-21T16:03:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Herbert Mason's beautiful rendering of the Gilgamesh Epic in blank verse, and personally I think this is the most touching and most human of all the epics that I have ever read. Indeed, in the first verse of the poem, it is already stated that "it is the story/of their becoming human together."

This theme of "becoming human" looms largely over the entire epic, and it touches on the human condition in a way that is poignant, celebratory, and wise. It is both an elegy for human morality and an affirmation of human achievements.

First, human life is viewed as ultimately a corruption, or a fall from an original state of innocence. And this is the first part of the epic, when Enkidu, an immortal human being who lives with animals and communicates with them, becomes "human" by sleeping with a prostitute. After the sexual act, Enkidu "felt a strange exhaustion/as if life had left his body."

Then Enkidu goes to Uruk, the city ruled by Gilgamesh, and upon encountering each other, they fight to a stalemate because they are both equals. And the moment of recognition of each other as equals is something that Nietzsche would have liked: "He turned to Enkidu who leaned/Against his shoulder and looked into his eyes/And saw himself in the other, just as Enkidu saw/Himself in Gilgamesh/In the silence of the people they began to laugh/And clutched each other in their breathless exaltation." The meeting of one's equal, therefore, is essential to "becoming human." The poem argues that without friendship of one's equal, one is not fully human.

After becoming best friends, Gilgamesh and Enkidu go to vanquish a monster, and in the battle, Enkidu is mortally wounded, but he weakens the monster enough so that Gilgamesh could win. But death approaches, and in one of the most agonizing passages that I have ever encountered in literature, Enkidu describes mortal existence in very stark terms. I'm going to quote the whole thing:

"Everything had life to me, he heard Enkidu murmur,
The sky, the storm, the earth, water, wandering,
The moon and its three children, salt, even my hand
Had life. It's gone. It's gone. I have seen death
As a total stranger sees another person's world,
Or as a freak sees whom the gods created
When they were drunk on too much wine
And had a contest to show off
The greatness of the harm that they could do,
Creating a man who had no balls or a woman
Without a womb, a crippled
Or deliberately maimed child
Or old age itself, blind eyes, trembling hands
Contorted in continual pain,
A starving dog too weak to eat,
A doe caught in a trap,
Wincing for help,
Or death."

And if you thought that was depressing, listen to what Enkidu says about the survivor, any survivor who must live with the knowledge that their loved one is gone:

"You will be left alone, unable to understand
In a world where nothing lives anymore
As you thought it did...She made me see
Things as a man, and a man see death in things.
That is what it is to be a man. You'll know
When you have lost the strength to see
The way you once did. You'll be alone and wander
Looking for that life that's gone or some
Eternal life you have to find...
Why am I to die,
You to wander on alone?
Is that the way it is with friends?"

That is an utterly devastating passage about the mortal nature of human existence, and anyone who has ever lost someone he has loved would undoubtedly recognize the crushing truth of that passage. After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is enveloped in a world of grief, and this passage once again describes, with stunning accuracy and insight, what it is like to be caught in a private world of grief:

"Until one learns acceptance of the silence
Amidst the new debris
Or turns again to grief
As the only source of privacy,
Alone with someone loved.
It could go on for years and years,
And has, for centuries,
For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That years and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death."

Gilgamesh refuses to believe that Enkidu is dead, and he goes on a journey to find Utnapishtim, an immortal who has survived the flood (and this flood myth is probably the ur-myth of Noah's Ark) and knows the secrets of immortality. When Gilgamesh finally finds Utnapishtim, he tells Gilgamesh:

"...I would grieve
At all that may befall you still
If I did not know you must return
And bury your own loss and build
Your world anew with your own hands.
I envy your freedom."

That right there contains, for me, the essence of the Gilgamesh epic: human mortality is devastating and painful, but there is always the hope that human beings can rebuild their lives, a possibility which is denied to someone who is immortal.

But moved by Gilgamesh's sorrow, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh to find a flower who will make him immortal and bring back Enkidu to life. But while falling asleep, a serpent comes and takes the flower away. Once again, one can clearly see just how much the Book of Genesis is influenced by the Gilgamesh epic. Upon waking, Gilgamesh weeps because he has lost immortality and once again "human."

Dejected, Gilgamesh goes back to Uruk to his people, and in the last verse of the epic, he looks at his city:

"He looked at the walls,
Awed at the heights
His people have achieved
And for a moment--just a moment--
All that lay behind him
Passed from view."

I cannot think of any better way to end the poem than that: Gilgamesh finally realizes that becoming human is to accept human mortality, with the misery, suffering, and tragedy that human existence inevitably entails--but becoming human is to also create, to achieve, to realize that even as beautiful things never last, they are nonetheless beautiful.

To me, this is indeed the oldest human story, and perhaps the only one, there is to tell. Even after thousands of years of being written, this poem still resonates because of its penetrating psychological insight and its firm grasp of the human condition. I highly, HIGHLY recommend reading the Gilgamesh epic, because it will get you to really think about what it means to be human. And plus, it is very short: you can finish it in an hour. But within this short poem, it contains the essence of being human.

And in reading this poem, I have finally understood what Nietzsche meant in the Birth of Tragedy when he says that life must be reaffirmed because of its tragedies, not in spite of them.

Books I've Been Reading

2008-03-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Nowadays I find myself reading in snippets: in short segments squeezed between slices of free time, during a lunch break, on the john, and in between various miscellaneous slots of time. A couple of pages here and there, and this is why it took me nearly three months to read two books, both of which I started in early January. And here's another thing that I've learned how to do as a result of little free time dedicated to reading non-class material: reading multiple books at once, switching off between them. I find that you can get a lot more reading done this way.

So for the past couple of months or so, I've been switching off between Ovid's Metamorphoses and Kafka's The Castle. I deliberately switched between verse and prose, just to give myself a switch up in style every now and then.

First, the Metamorphoses: it's a coincidence, albeit not an unhappy one, that I started reading it at the same time as when I started reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and the Use and Abuse of History for a class, since the two are connected. It's an interesting perspective to read Nietzsche's conception of myths and at the same time reading the myths themselves. I found that reading Nietzsche and Ovid complementary, as one is the raw material upon which the theory is built.

Second, The Castle: as most critics have remarked, it should really be read in conjunction, or right after, The Trial. Reading Kafka always leaves me with a strange sensation, one of a lingering uneasiness, a unsettling feeling that is both ineffable and inescapable. In fact, sometimes I wonder why I even read Kafka for "fun" during my leisure time, because reading Kafka always makes me tense up, makes it squirm, although nothing terrifying in the conventional sense ever happens in Kafka. But there is this insidious and sinister quality to Kafka's writing that I find both repulsive and fascinating.

What's next: I read books the way I listen to music--when I read a book or listen to an album, I am always thinking what that particular book or music is reminding me of, and how it is connected thematically/historically/emotionally with other books/albums that I have in my collection. This is not really a systematic process by any means, but rather more like an intuition, a quick impression.

Reading the Metamorphoses has rekindled my desire to re-read classical epic poetry. In that vein, I'm gonna be starting with the Iliad, then the Odyssey, and finish with the Aeneid--in other words, the Trojan war trilogy if you will. And since yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, reading about the Trojan War seems especially relevant now.

Continuing along the path of The Castle, I am gonna to re-read both Moby Dick and Don Quixote: the reason being that, like The Castle, both Moby Dick and Don Quixote are really quest-stories. Like The Castle, both raises sceptical questions about what exactly can be found in a quest. To me, both works upend and subvert the traditional quest narrative by suggesting that life, as a quest, is ultimately bound to end in absurdity and futility.

Baron Davis is on LOLerskates...literally

2008-03-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

Baron Davis skates around wearing a tank top and short-shorts, wearing Kanye glasses, toting a boombox, playing some funky shit. Oh man, I was on the floor when I saw this.

Obama's Speech on Race

2008-03-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

Taking a break after finishing the first draft of my Nietzsche paper, I would like to write something about Obama's speech (full text here) that he gave this morning. It is probably the best political speech I have heard in my life time, short as that may be, and I have a very strong feeling that the speech will be remembered historically, in the context of other great political speeches of this country, long after people will have forgotten the immediate political context that gave rise to it.

What Obama says about race is in fact not controversial, or even profoundly new. But I give him tremendous credit for saying it, because that is the problem we have in our political discourse today: very few people are willing to tackle the subject of race relations head on with anything remotely resembling sensibility, moderation, and subtlety.

Too often, the political discourse on race falls into the following three categories:

1) That race is no longer something that we need to worry about, because slavery was a long time ago.

2) That race is the explanation for every social inequality in this country, and this has both its black radical and white liberal variants. In other words, this is a game of playing the victim and blaming "the man."

3) That "race" is itself reverse racism because it discriminates against whites who did not personally participate in slavery or oppression. This is mostly done by very right-wing commentators.

Of course, there is some element of the truth in all three categories: we have made some progress toward racial equality, we still have elements of systematic racial discrimination in our society, and we do have people who feels, rightfully in my opinion, that they should not be punished for the sins of their fathers.

What I like most about Obama's speech is that he acknowledged the elements of truth in all three, but rejected the people who over-simply and reduce any discussions on race to caricature, hysterics, and naked political manipulation.

He didn't sugar coat the fact that America has always had trouble reconciling slavery with its professed ideals, and he does this in the very beginning of the speech, when he points out that the Constitution allowed the slave trade. He didn't try to ignore race and pretend that racial harmony is now achieved--he rightly points out that there are deep-seated, but unspoken resentment among blacks and whites toward each other.

But more importantly, he argued that this resentment, both black and white, has a legitimate basis because of our historical legacy: blacks because they have suffered from a legacy of systematic discrimination; whites because they feel that they are punished for things they weren't personally responsible for.

And this is where I have to applaud Obama, because he tried to walk a very, very, very delicate and fine line. But ultimately I think he is correct, because there are indeed legitimate reasons for both blacks and whites to be deeply unsatisfied with the legacy of slavery and systematic discrimination. That he is willing to come out and say this is courageous in my opinion, because like I said before, most political discussion on race quickly degenerates into either victimization and finger-pointing.

Instead, Obama asked people to actually stop and consider the other side's point of view: in other words, he called on people to try to understand each other, instead of demonizing each other as either "white oppressors" or "welfare bums." He points out that demonizing is easy--it has been the basis of many kind of politics. That he had faith to believe that people can overcome such politics is telling, and more importantly, brave, because he is essentially staking his entire campaign on this faith that people can get over the old divisions.

And that is what matters to me: because I am deeply, deeply, deeply dissatisfied with how political discourse is conducted in this country. It is exactly like Obama says: it's too easy to demonize, and most politicians find that temptation too hard to resist. That Obama is at least trying to redirect the political discourse onto something like a honest, substantive discussion on very difficult issues is admirable in my point of view.

Ultimately, the political reality is one of complexity, contradictions, and nuances that don't fit "purity tests" of ideology, and it is hardly ever, if it was at all, a reality of either-or, black-or-white, men-or-women, old-or-young, Beatles-or-the Stones. I give Obama a lot of credit for giving people a lot of credit, based on his belief that they can in fact think for themselves and come to independent judgments that do not fit neatly into some ideological categories one way or another.

Interestingly enough, I find Obama's conception of politics to be closely aligned with Hannah Arendt's conception of politics: that is to say, politics is the result of many different people acting together. And that has been the theme of Obama's campaign: to build a broad-based coalition that acts together to solve problems that they can't solve on their own. It is refreshing to hear this kind of talk, because for too long the republican ideals of this country have lain dormant. Instead, what prevailed was a conception of politics as a zero-sum game in which a gain for blacks is automatically seen as a loss for whites, a conception of politics which is above all else, a fight between special interests whose outcomes are determined by who has more money and more resources.

This is why I was extremely moved when I read the speech. The first time I read the speech, I was struck by its nuance, by the fact that it actually made an argument that required the reader/listener to pay close attention to follow its balancing act--a speech, in other words, that didn't treat everyone like idiots and cleave to the lowest common denominator.

The second time I read it, I was moved, almost to tears, because for once someone put some faith in people's ability to change things. I have been following and studying American politics for as long as I could speak English, and this is the first time that I have seen a politician who really and sincerely believe that people can transcend the petty divisions created by other politicians to exploit.

In this case, inspiration IS an asset, a huge, irreplaceable one, because if people do not believe in what you are saying, no matter how well-planed, how well-executed your policy prescriptions are, they will not be effective. If Obama can truly and really get people to believe that it is time to move on beyond the old political fault lines and act together, then he will have done something monumental.

But of course, my internal critic, one who has probably read too much Carl Schmitt, will say that any such "transcendence" will be only temporary, since politics is premised upon the creation of distinctions between self and other. That might be true, I am inclined to say, but maybe it's time to move beyond "race" as the distinction. After all, even Carl Schmitt claims that political distinctions and struggles are creative forces: and for too long the old racial distinction has stifled any kind of meaningful change.

Yet some might still argue that I have no dog in the fight, since I am neither black nor white. But I reply that problems such as tremendous inequality in education, criminal punishment, healthcare access, social capital are not simply "their" or "our" problems--they are everyone's problems. And here I am laying all my cards on the table: I conceive of citizenship as being a member of the body politic, and as such, a problem in one part of the body is a problem for the body as a whole. I conceive of citizenship as more than merely an entitlement for rights-protection; I conceive of citizenship as being fully invested in the community to which one belongs. In other words, I am a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-core, old-school Republican: not the Republican in the sense of the Republican party, but Republican in the sense of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Rousseau.

UPDATE: Here's a video of the entire speech. It's a shame that the speech was given at 11 in the morning to a small cable audience. This should really be broadcast in its entirety on public networks, because we all know what happens in the news cycle, especially on cable: soundbiting the shit out of a nuanced speech, quoting out of context to distort.

Another Nerd Bites the Dust

2008-03-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

Coming right at the heels of Gary Gygax's death, Arthur C. Clarke, he of 2001: Space Odyssey, died today.

That's two icons/legends of nerds/geeks world over dying within 2 weeks of each other. I have to say that, as a verifiable nerd and geek, those two guys played some part in the formation of my identity.

I never played an actual game of Dungeons and Dragons, but god knows I played D&D-based computer RPG games while growing up. I must have played Baldur's Gate 2 at least 8 times, and since each play through is about 60 to 70 hours, that's a lot of hours. But I loved it--every single time.

What is interesting about Gary Gygax, and D&D in general, is that Gygax essentially introduced a computational model of existence into the mainstream. D&D is not the first game to numerically represent states of existence, but it made it popular, to the extent that now nobody even blinks an eye when a character's "health" or "life" is represented in points. Every aspect of D&D's world is numerical, including morality. Because the difference between lawful neutral and chaotic good is only about a couple of points.

And we see it everywhere in today's video games: D&D essentially introduced a whole way of modeling a virtue world based on purely mathematical models. And we have taken that for granted: after all, if you really think about it, what do "levels" really mean? It certainly doesn't map onto anything we might call a maturation or learning process in real life. It's a mathematical model of convenience, so that the game creator can have an easy way to create an incentive and award structure for the player. This structure is still with us today, in almost every video game ever made.

In other words: without D&D, we would not have video games as we know them today.

As for Arthur C. Clarke, I read 2001 when I was in 8th grade, about 13 years old. And frankly, it freaked me out a little bit, but it also intrigued me. Arthur C. Clarke got me thinking seriously about science fiction, and even though nowadays I tend to be dismissive of most science fiction books, I nonetheless acknowledge that sci-fi, if executed properly, can become a legitimate exercise in philosophical speculation--and I think this way because of Arthur C. Clarke.

Happiness is a Warm, Oh Yes It is, Guuuunnnnnn

2008-03-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

Bang bang shoot shoot.

Personally, I have a sexual reading of this famous Beatles song: after all, the gun is a phallic symbol, and "bang bang shoot shoot" can really only mean thing if we are talking about a warm gun.

But my point is this: happiness is really at bottom an absurd concept, and John Lennon's nonsensical interpretation of the concept is just as meaningless as every other attempt to define happiness throughout history. It makes as much sense to say that happiness is a warm gun as it is to say that happiness is God's Grace, or that happiness is the realization of virtue, or that happiness is the attainment of knowledge.

The conceptual problem is that "happiness" as a category is used so broadly over such a disparate range of other concepts that it has become vacuous, without any substantive meaning. It's simply an umbrella term for another set of concepts, which are themselves not precise. Thus, "happiness" is veil upon veil upon veil, such that what it actually describes is anything, everything, and nothing.

Furthermore, we have the real problem of the epistemology of happiness: how do we know when we have attained happiness? If we can't really say what happiness is without any meaningful degree of precision, then there is no possibility of answering the epistemological question. But you might object and say that questions of epistemology don't arise for a concept like "happiness," but if it doesn't arise, then how can anyone anywhere claim to know when he or others have attained it?

Part of the confusion, at least to me, lies in the fact that the concept of "happiness" has been used either as an intrinsic end or as an instrumental means, but most people don't make the conceptual distinction--hence the confusion. It is much more plausible to define "happiness" as an intrinsic end, since then you can flesh it out yourself, but when it is used instrumentally, then it really has no meaning of its own.

The confusion arises because happiness is an ancient concept, going all the way back to Aristotle, who used the term "eudaimonia" in the Nicomachean Ethics, and that is nowadays often translated as "happiness." But a more proper translation would be to translate "eudaimonia" as "human flourishing," and already there is a distinction: flourishing does not mean the same thing as happy. But even if we were to use the less appropriate translation, Aristotle at least substantively fleshed out what he meant by the concept: he meant it as an intrinsic state of being in which the human being is living virtuously (briefly and broadly summarized). Even if one disagrees with this definition, at least it is defined.

However, when most people use the concept "happiness" today, they really mean it instrumentally: happiness for most people consist in achieving other things, things like knowledge, marriage, physical health, wealth, moral wisdom, power, and so forth. "Happiness" simply becomes a label for these other, different concepts.

In other words, "happiness" became the signifier rather than the signified.

We really don't have an understanding of "happiness" as something, a state of existence for example, as its own state. Rather, we use it to mean a state of other kinds. This is the source of the confusion: either we use "happiness" as a signifier and admit that as a signifier, it really has no intrinsic meaning of its own, or we somehow substantiate "happiness." None of this having the cake and eating it too bullshit.

In fact, I would argue that "happiness" cannot be anything BUT a signifier, because even in Aristotle, what it signifies is virtue, not "happiness." We cannot make sense of "happiness" as an intrinsic concept because it doesn't make any conceptual sense. But you could object and respond that what "happiness" signifies, such as virtue, knowledge, power, etc., are themselves "signifiers."

I'll grant you that objection, but that doesn't really get us anywhere, because in the end, it might be that all we are doing as thinking beings is to come up with signifiers to impose on the world. But then the question to ask is no longer "how can I be happy?", but rather "how can I be virtuous?" or "how I can make a lot of money?", or "how can I become powerful?", etc., etc.

In other words, be more precise with concepts. We might never really become absolutely precise, but my opinion is that "happiness" is way too general and shallow of a conceptual sphere to operate in. It doesn't really tell us anything meaningful or revealing about the person who thinks in terms of "happiness." What we are interested in is what that person means by "happiness," and thus of a deeper, more fundamental level of inquiry, understanding, and more importantly, bonding.

This is why I loathe it when people ask me if I am happy? It is a meaningless question: it cannot elicit any kind of interesting answer. Unless of course they ask me what I think "happiness" signifies, then perhaps we could get into a conversation that makes both interlocutors more informed about each other and come away with a better understanding of each other.

But in the end, even the "signifier/signifed" distinction is problematic: because if happiness signifies another state of being, is that state of being pursued because it makes us happy, or do we pursue happiness because it produces that particular state? Then we get into a circle, and of course you can stop the circle by designating one or the other as intrinsic or instrumental, but any such designation will be arbitrary.

So in the end, I find it useful to try to avoid talking about happiness as much as possible, because it really doesn't get me anywhere. Like Wittgenstein famously said: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." And like him, I find that our language really does not have anything resembling an adequate description of "happiness," so even if I concede the metaphysical point that there might be such a thing as "happiness" somewhere out there, I have no way of accessing it, and thus it becomes completely useless to me.

Leave Biggie Alone!

2008-03-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Leave it to Hollywood to dig up an ugly hip hop beef a decade after the fact, when its cultural/artistic/social significance have faded, when everyone who calls himself a hip hop fan has hoped to let the past stay in the past, when people try to forget the fact that the beef prematurely killed two very talented rappers.

I speak, of course, of the upcoming biopic (reporting by the New York Times) about Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a., the Notorious B.I.G., one of the greatest hip hop talents of all time whose sheer skill for constructing intricate rhymes loaded to the brim with word play, creative delivery, and the knack for telling ghetto stories in technicolor and cinemascope has yet to find a modern day equivalent.

Nobody's big enough to fill Biggie's shoes, let alone a fucking standard-issue biopic.

The whole thing smells like a quick cash-squeeze, and the studios make no qualms about this:

"“Notorious” will push Searchlight, best known as a perennial Oscar contender with films like “Juno” and “Sideways,” into a tougher kind of African-American storytelling than it has tackled before in films like “I Think I Love My Wife,” directed by Chris Rock, or the comedy “Phat Girlz,” with Mo’Nique."

That's Hollywood-speak for "I want to make some money off of black people."

And it continues:

"Success would tap a vast urban audience and might catch the kind of broad-based business that made “8 Mile,” which starred the white rapper Eminem, a significant hit for Universal Pictures just over five years ago."

So the picture emerges: Fox is trying to get the same demographic that made 8 Mile a hit, even though that movie came out ages ago, and hip hop is nowhere near its commercial viability now as it was back then, let alone its artistic viability.

Furthermore, there is something very suspicious about the movie's release timing: the movie is timed to be released just when a trial about his murder is going to a jury trial.

"If Searchlight meets its intended release date of Jan. 16, however, the picture and its attendant promotions could well become a factor in the court fight.
They might, for instance, feed a Notorious B.I.G. revival while jurors are deliberating responsibility for his death or perhaps determining damages based on the presumed value of a career that was cut short. “It’s clear he had tremendous earning potential,” Mr. Sanders said."

Blatant exploitation of Biggie's death, all in the name of "earning potential"? This kind of shit gets me fucking pissed.

What really gets me though is the fact that the movie is claiming that it will try to "humanize" Biggie by softening up his "harsh" public image with that of a family man. Jesus fucking Christ! I hate it when movies do this to people after they are dead.

"Mr. Tillman said that the movie’s Notorious B.I.G. would sharply differ from that rapper’s harsh public image. “The major theme we’re working toward is family, being a man, what it takes to be a man,” he said. The movie follows Mr. Wallace from childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn through his death, and various scenes will “capture the spirit and reason for certain things” without making detailed accusations, Mr. Tillman said."

Biggie should be judged, first and foremost, as a rapper. And in that regard, few can ever rival him, because he is one of the greatest of all time. His skill and craft speak for themselves. Why does every black rapper who rhymes about the ghetto need to be "humanized," to be made safe for mainstream white audiences?

Anyone who pays attention to what Biggie raps about in his songs should know that Biggie was a very complicated man (and only ones who knew him were his women, but I digress--SHAFT!). But on a serious note, Biggie is way more complex than your average gun-toting, mouth-running, fake-hustling modern rapper (Ja Rule anyone?) He was talking about growing up in the ghetto with no family, hustling on the streets to pay rent, paying the deadly spiritual and moral tolls of leading such an existence.

To say that Biggie is somehow a simplistic "thug" in need of an image make-over by some greedy Hollywood studio is to fucking insult the man's life, intelligence, and art. I'll leave you on this note, one of the illest verses commited to paper and rhyme in the history of the genre:

"If I wasn't in the rap game/I'd probably have a key knee deep in the crack game/Because the streets is a short stop/Either you're slingin' crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot/Shit, it's hard being young from the slums/Eatin' five cent gums not knowin' where your meal's comin from/And now the shit's gettin' crazier and major/Kids younger than me, they got the sky grand pagers/Goin' outta town, blowin up/Six months later all the dead bodies showin' up/It make me wanna grab the nine and the shotty/But I gotta go identify the body/Damn, what happened to the summertime cookouts?/Everytime I turn around a nigga gettin' took out/Shit, my momma got cancer in her breast/Don't ask me why I'm motherfuckin' stressed, things done changed"

The Weekly 10 #6

2008-03-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

Click here for this week's files.

1) Dexter Gordon - Easy Living (from Bouncin' With Dex)
This album is fairly obscure in Dexter Gordon's catalog, and it is currently out of print and only available as an import. It's a record mostly of Dex playing ballads: it might not be his artistic masterpiece, but Dex has a very smooth tone which is perfect for playing ballads, and this song is an example.

2) Modest Mouse - The Good Times Are Killing Me (from Good News For People Who Love Bad News)
This is the last cut on the album, and it's got a fairly loose/casual atmosphere, as evidenced by the inclusion of studio banter at the beginning of the song. An upbeat song about shitty times.

3) Radiohead - All I Need (from In Rainbows, disc 1)
I haven't listened to Radiohead for a while, so I busted out the album today and gave it a spin, and re-discovered the reasons why I love them, especially on this track. The last section of the song, when the fireworks go off with the crazy strings, glockenspiel, and Thom Yorke's voice soaring above all the chaos, is in my opinion the most sublime fragment in all of Radiohead's catalog. The song might not be the best song, but that specific section transcends pretty much everything the band has done musically.

4) Penderecki - Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (from EMI's 2-disc collection of the composer's orchestral works)
This piece is absolutely terrifying: the screaming strings will startle you and make you jump, as it is entirely appropriate, because it's expressing the screams of a thousand people as a nuclear bomb is dropped on them. I chose this song to follow "All I Need" because they use strings similarly, but Penderecki's use is more brutal and direct. This song never lets up because it puts you in a constant state of dread, even in its moments of lull, because you never know when the next wave of dissonance will come.

5) Explosions in the Sky - The Moon is Down (from Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever)
Apart from the unfortunately and unnecessarily long title, this is probably EITS' best album in my opinion. There is a quite a mythology that has grown up around this album, seeing how it is released a week before 9/11, from a band called explosions in the sky, featuring a liner note that says "this plane will crash tomorrow." Although it would be ridiculous to call this the "soundtrack" to 9/11, the album is undoubtedly bleak, lacking the triumphant vibes of its follow-up album, which I wrote about last week. "The Moon is Down" is a pretty good example of this atmosphere and mood.

6) MONO - Yearning (from You Are There)
This song has a similar mood to "The Moon is Down," but it is much heavier. About seven minutes in, you will get pounded and blown away. I recommend listening to this song when no one is at home, and then turning it up to 11 on your stereo, and sit back and be prepared to have your world rocked and your face melted.

7) Gong - Zero the Hero and the Witch's Spell (from The Flying Teapot)
This is some weird, spacey, drug-addled prog music from the 70s, and Gong is definitely on some kind of LSD trip. In other words, if you hate all the so-called "excesses" of 70s prog-rock with its spaced-out mythologies involving elfs and demons, then you probably won't like Gong. I, on the other hand, like prog for precisely those same reasons: not because I think they are artistically significant, but it's a good laugh. Plus, Gong really knows how to play their instruments.

8) Beth Orton - Pass in Time (from Central Reservation)
Beth Orton has a really nice singing voice: if that is not a huge understatement, I don't know what is. I was immediately grabbed by her voice, and it tends to put me in a trance-like state. I think this is a gorgeous, but ultimately melancholy song.

9) Anton Dvorak - Piano Trio No. 4, "Dumky Trio," First movement (from Harmonia Mundi's recording of the Cello Concerto and the Piano Trio)
The melancholy theme continues, since "Dumky" is plural for "dumka", which means melancholy in Czech. This trio features piano, violin, and the cello. This is the first movement of the trio.

10) Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye (from the album of the same title)
This is fairly chill, down-tempo electronica, good for relaxation listening. I think if you like Air, you will probably like the Junior Boys.

The Decline of the New York Times

2008-03-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm not saying that anyone does not know already, but man, the New York Times have really gone down the shitter lately.

First, there was the (non-)story about John McCain's possible extra-marital affair with a lobbyist, which ended up getting a lot of coverage for reasons I can't understand, since the article itself didn't prove or even allege anything. I mean, if you are going to insinuate that McCain has had an affair with a lobbyist, then you might as well come out and say it. I had no idea what the New York Times was trying to do with that article, and I'm not even sure what the point of it was. Yet suddenly it became a huge media shit-storm, which ended up being about the media itself. How narcissistic, and expected.

Then, Frank Rich writes a ridiculous column comparing Hillary's campaign to how Bush managed the Iraq campaign. Remember, this was right during Obama's 11 state winning streak. I bet Frank Rich would like to take those words back now.

Then, the New York Times decided to expose the identity of the prostitute which brought down Eliot Spitzer, by citing, of all possible sources, her MySpace page! I mean, really, what is the point of that story? Sure, the girl will probably get her 15 minutes of fame, and then fade into the background. What exactly does revealing her identity do?

And to top it off, David Brooks writes this extremely retarded and third-rate column, posing as a community college psychologist, analyzing so called "Type A" personalities and their penchant for getting off on hookers.

I suppose that in the end, the New York Times is still better than USAToday, but this recent string of non-stories, shitty columns, and sub-par journalism really made my estimation of the newspaper go down dramatically. The only thing really worth reading now is the Times' movie reviews, since their movie critics are actually fairly good.

A Formal Definition of Prostitution

2008-03-14T01:57:00.000-07:00

This is a rough sketch of the first part of my seminar paper on the moral defensibility (or lack thereof, depending on the conclusion) of prostitution. The first step in drawing a conclusion about whether prostitution is morally defensible, I have to first come up with a working definition of prostitution.

In that regard, what I have tried to come up with is a formal definition of prostitution, and my aim in coming up with this definition is try to come up with some conditions that would meet most people's understanding of what prostitution is. It is not meant to be exhaustive, and like any formal definition, it will have limitations, and those limitations could be deemed arbitrary. But if I am successful, this formal definition of prostitution will mostly capture what people mean when they think of prostitution.

A crucial point is that this definition is not meant to have any normative content whatsoever.

Having said all that, the formal definition for prostitution that I have come up with this is:

Prostitution is a commercial act of exchange in which there are a buyer and a seller, and what is being exchanged is physical sex.

Now, to break down each constitutive component. First, it's crucial to recognize that prostitution is essentially a commercial act of exchange. That is to say, something is being exchanged between two parties, and that exchange is characterized by transfer of payments.

Second, what is being exchanged is physical sex. Why "physical"? Because some empirical evidence suggest that some buyers do not in fact buy physical service of any kind--some of them simply pay to have someone to talk to, for example. Although one could plausibly include this in the formal definition of prostitution, I think that this is not what a common, average understanding of prostitution involves, so I left it out. Similarly, there is empirical evidence that some buyers do pay for physical acts, but acts which do not fall under the category of intercourse. Again, I left this out because most people understand prostitution as involving sexual intercourse.

Third, a formal definition of prostitution should include the concept of transfer of payments, and this needs not necessarily be understood in solely monetary terms. Payments can take a variety of forms other than cash payments; it could include payments in kind.

What have I left out from this formal definition?

First, I have left out the gender of the parties involved. The exclusion seems obvious to me, as there is no logical necessity why prostitution cannot occur among members of both genders.

Second, I have left out the age of the parties involved. As repulsive as it is, prostitution seems to know no age.

Third, I have left out the legality of the transaction: prostitution does not become something else whether it's legal or not.

Fourth, I have left out the role of middle men in the transaction. Most empirical evidence suggest that prostitution usually takes place with the aid of middle men (pimps), but there is nothing to suggest that prostitution cannot logically occur without them.

Fifth, and perhaps this is really arguable, is that I have left out consent. Now it would seem that an act of exchange would imply some sort of consent, but there is nothing in the concept of "exchange" itself that suggests that consent must be present.

What I essentially done is two things. First, I have tried to come up with some minimum formal features that would constitute an action as prostitution. Second, I have left out certain features of prostitution, which while they might be empirically very close to prostitution, can nonetheless be logically separated from the concept of prostitution. The result, I hope, is a formal definition of prostitution that meet most people's understanding of prostitution while not trying to cover every possible instances of prostitution that has ever been carried out.

The next step, before anything else, is to see if I can make any kind of normative judgment about prostitution based on this formal definition alone, without introducing the empirical features most closely associated with prostitution. But that is for another day.

Quit Abusing Aristotle!

2008-03-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

As the Eliot Spizter scandal train-wreck rolls on in the news cycle, all kinds of narratives have emerged, and most of them invoke the pattern of the tragic hero and his downfall, in the mode of Aristotle's Poetics.

Wrong!

We should really stop abusing Aristotle for these kind of thing. Sure, Eliot Spitzer was brought down by an action which he was known for prosecuting, and sure, a once promising political career on the rise is now lying in smoldering ruins, but is this really heroic?

Because that is the characteristic of a proper Aristotlean tragic hero: he had to be heroic.

Is fucking a hooker heroic? I somehow doubt that. It's not like the guy tried to cure a plague affecting the state of New York and inadvertently found out that he married his mother and killed his father. Nor was he someone who was engaged in some particularly noble endeavor while he was busted.

There were no fucking grand, cosmological rules of Fate being played out here: Eliot Spitzer wasn't "destined" to "fall," because let's face it, marital infidelity, unless it involves some really eloquent soliloquies and mutual suicide, does not really fit into the classical Aristotlean conception of tragedy.

So let's just state the facts: Eliot Spitzer fucked a hooker and cheated on his wife and family, and for that he has been and will continue to be punished, as he deserves it. But please, let us not make him into a Greek tragic hero. But then again, it's understandable: after all, members of the media have to use their MFA in Comparative Literature sometimes.

Q: What is Sweet 'n Sour Chicken without the Sweet n' Sour Sauce?

2008-03-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

Answer: An enigma so confounding, so perplexing that any dialectical attempt to resolve it would result in immediate and fatal brain aneurysm.

This was honestly what happened when I ordered some food at Taiwan Restaurant today. I was waiting for my order, and in walks in this white girl, and she proceeded to order the sweet and sour chicken to go.

But the wrinkle was this: she didn't want the sweet and sour sauce? When I heard this request, I was dumbfounded. Why the hell would you want to order sweet and sour chicken if you are not going to get the sauce which is the reason why sweet and sour chicken is called sweet and sour chicken? Sweet and sour chicken without the accompanying sauce is just chicken deep-fried in batter: it's just breaded chicken.

The cashier shared my confusion, because he asked her if she meant that she wanted the sauce on the side, but she replied, apparently with a straight face and all the sincerity in the world, "No, I just don't want the sauce at all."

But why? What the FUCK is the point of ordering the dish then?

I mean, if she REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted some breaded chicken, she could've just gone to Colonel Sanders and gotten a bucket of these:

The Lurid Absurdity of Eliot Spitzer's Prostitution Scandal

2008-03-10T19:04:00.001-07:00

I think by now, everyone has heard about the news that Eliot Spitzer is implicated in a prostitution ring.

Slate has obtained some legal documents, among which are the website that fronted the prostitution ring, and part of the wiretap transcripts that between two prostitutes that referenced Spitzer, known here only as "Client 9."

First, you have to admit that there is something hilarious about the fact that Spitzer was referenced as "Client 9": this is like his secret spy name or something.

Second, for someone whose political career is built on a reputation of nailing other people, mostly corporate white collar criminals, Spitzer got nailed himself. And the ironic thing is that while he was a state prosecutor, he went over prostitution rings himself.

Third, Eliot Spitzer, if he were to be prosecuted, would be prosecuted not for a state crime, but for a federal felony, for violating the Mann Act, or more commonly known as the White Slave Act. Passed in the early 1900s, the Mann Act was Congress' attempt to regulate morality in the states through the interstate commerce clause. The Mann Act has an interesting history, because it was used to convict Jack Johnson, a black boxer who married a white prostitute. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled that the act was constitutional in Hoke vs. US.

I mean, what a weird turn of events if you really think about: Eliot Spitzer now faces possible prosecution based on a 100 year old law whose constitutional basis rests on the interstate commerce clause. Unbelievable.

But the deeper philosophical issue for me is the legality of prostitution. I have been doing a lot of reading on this very topic, in order to write a 15 to 20 page seminar paper. Looking at the debate around legalizing prostitution, most of it either centers around an utilitarian discussion of the benefits of legalizing prostitution. Those who oppose legalization do so on vaguely Kantian grounds.

I am not entirely satisfied with the state of the debate, and I think that a more philosophically rigorous approach is needed. Thus, my project is to see if prostitution can be morally defended on non-utilitarian grounds. Namely, I will be looking to see if prostitution inherently violates the formulation of Kant's categorical imperative, both its autonomy and dignity variants.

So far, my thesis is that there is nothing inherent in prostitution (defined broadly and roughly as the selling of services that produce sexual pleasure for the buyer) that violates the categorical imperative. I tend to agree with Martha Nussbaum that it is the context of prostitution that makes or breaks, so to speak, the moral case against/for it. Therefore, if it is the context that is the salient difference, then there is nothing "inherent" about prostitution that suggests that prostitution will always violate the categorical imperative a priori.

Having made this argument, then one can go back to the utilitarian debates and ask what kind of laws/policies/regulations can and should be enacted in order to shape the context of prostitution in such a way that protects sex workers' welfare, autonomy, and dignity.

Of course, this is a very early and very rough outline of the argument that I will be making in the seminar paper, and a lot of details still need to be worked out. But that is, in a nutshell, the bare skeleton of my argument.

The Weekly 10 #5

2008-03-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

Click here for the download.

Week 5: the first time I bought CDs in a while, I think a month maybe. I bought 6 CDs, and one song from each is included, and the four others are some old stuff.

1) Glen Hansard - Gold
After watching Once, I bought the soundtrack, because I thought the movie was very well done: low-key, not melodramatic, and genuine. I like this particular song because of it is traditional-sounding, like an old folk song.

2) Max Roach - Tears for Johannesburg
I bought Max Roach's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite album on a whim, because thus far, the only thing I've heard from Max Roach is his work as a side man to Sonny Rollins and Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. I wanted something of his own composition. And I was not let down, and once again reminded that you can, in fact, make good political music that can still resonate in contemporary times.

3) Explosions In The Sky - Six Days At the Bottom of the Ocean
In my never-ending quest to get my hands on as much good post-rock as I can, I picked up EITS's second album up. Placing them in context, I'd say they are somewhere in between Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor: they are not as hard-rocking as Mogwai, also not as classical-oriented/texturally rich as GY!BE. If GY!BE music is the soundtrack to a nihilistic apocalypse of scorched earth and decay, then EITS music is like the soundtrack that would accompany a shot of a seed growing in the scorched earth. In other words, it is warmer, and dare I say it, even more triumphant? There's always a place for bombast, but sometimes I get the feeling that EITS isn't being ironic about it.

4) The Mountain Goats - Pale Green Things
I've been meaning to pick up a Mountain Goats album for ages now, mainly because of the reputation for great lyrics. And since listening to The Sunset Tree, I have to say that I am not misinformed. John Darnielle might not be a technically excellent singer, but damn, the dude can write! I think by now, everyone should know that you don't need technical vocal excellence to make great music, cf. Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

5) A Tribe Called Quest - Verses From The Abstract
There is a reason why this album is called the Low End Theory: it's because the bass is dope. Ron Carter rocks it hard on the upright bass, and the whole album in general has a very generous and healthy low-end foundation. You really need a subwoofer to appreciate the bass on this--those shitty iPod earphones just won't do it.

6) Goldfrapp - Monster Love
I always liked Goldfrapp of Felt Mountain more than the Goldfrapp of Supernature--in other words, I like Goldfrapp more when they do more psychedelic/laid-back stuff rather than when they do their straight up electro-dance numbers. Therefore, I looked forward to Seventh Tree, Goldfrapp's latest record, when I heard that it's being called a return to their earlier days. This might have something to do with the fact that I can't dance if my life depended on it. This is the last track on the album, and it is very warm and relaxing.

7) Boards of Canada - Zoetrope
This is from their EP titled In A Beautiful Place Out In the Country, and this song sounds, to use the same word, very warm and analog. It puts me in a calm state. Unfortunately the EP is out of print and now commands a pretty hefty price on the used market.

8) Nine Inch Nails - 31 Ghosts IV
After a week of listening to Ghosts I-IV, I am still very much liking the album. In my opinion, Ghosts IV is the best of the bunch, and I picked this song because it is a re-imagining of the guitar part in "Just Like You Imagined" from The Fragile, which is one of my all time favorite NIN songs.

9) Aimee Mann - Ghost World
This is from Bachelor No. 2, which in my opinion is Aimee Mann's best studio work to date. This song got played a lot because of what it talks about: life after graduation, albeit a very pessimistic version of it, something which is on my mind a lot these days.

10) PJ Harvey - Working For The Man
This is from To Bring You My Love, which probably is my favorite PJ Harvey album thus far. This song picks up where "Verses From The Abstract" left off: prodigious bass. I simply love the bass in this song--it gives the song an extremely solid foundation. Again, you absolutely NEED a subwoofer to appreciate how good the bass is. This song is very simple, but it's all the little touches that make it great: the repetitive guitar riff and the shaker in the chorus. Something about this song is very hypnotic.

The Liability of Stating the Obvious

2008-03-08T22:53:00.000-08:00

Two "incidents" with the Obama campaign has been getting a lot of press play lately in the news cycle: first, the so-called "leaked memo" from Austan Goolsbee, his economic adviser, to a Canadian consulate; second, Samantha Power's interviews with The Scotman and the BBC.

What struck me about both of these things is that in both cases, stating the obvious has become controversial.

In the memo to the Canadian consulate, Goolsbee stated that Obama is only taking a hardball stance on NAFTA in order to win Ohio. Well, duh. What else do people expect him to do? If populism is what it takes to win, then candidates will do it. Clinton did it no less, even if she did support NAFTA during her husband's administration.

Once again, the politicians are taking the easy road and ignoring the difficult things that must be undertaken if they are really serious about fairness for the people of Ohio who have lost their manufacturing jobs because of NAFTA. Sure, beating the populist drum is easy--anyone can play that particular guitar. But the real question is this: what are they going to do about the people of Ohio?

Clinton keeps saying that she will renegotiate NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, but so far what is to be negotiated are environmental provisions of NAFTA, which you bet all your money that an unemployed, blue-collar worker in Ohio will not give a rat's ass about.

If both Clinton and Obama are really serious about the people in Ohio, then they should have talked about job retraining programs for people who have lost their jobs. Instead, they took the easy as shit position of populism. This is just so typical of American political discourse: ignore the difficult and uncertain task of finding concrete solutions and focusing on some straw man to knock down. Four years later, rinse and repeat, ad nauseum.

As for the Samantha Power "incident," I just don't get the controversy. Sure, she called Hillary a "monster," which I agree was not that tactful, but is that really any worse than Hillary's surrogates implying that Obama is a Muslim or that he has used drugs in the past? Let's not get into a game of "who's the bigger victim" here.

Second, why is Power being taken to task for saying to BBC that Obama's troop withdrawal plan is only a "best case scenario?" What else could it possibly be? We have 10 months left before the next president, whoever that is, will take office. 10 months is a long time for things to change on the ground, for better or worse. Of course any plan is based on some kind of speculation.

That this is obvious should be true for anyone who has even a remote grasp of how foreign policy works, especially for someone like Samantha Power, who is a renowned international relations scholar. So why are people taking her to task for saying what she is undoubtedly qualified to say?

So again I have to task: what the fuck?

Nietzsche and the Aesthetic Justification of Life

2008-03-05T22:15:00.000-08:00

My first paper on for Sluga's Nietzsche class, which answers the prompt: what does Nietzsche mean when he says that life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon?

Of course, there are a lot of limitations in a five page paper, so a number of things will not be addressed. I'm not responsible for how you use this.

All citations refer to page numbers in the Douglas Smith translation published by Oxford University Press, 2000.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (38). What he means by this radical proposition is without art, life is not worth living. Nietzsche speaks of art in a specific sense--tragic art, as exemplified by the Greek tragedies. Tragic art justifies existence, Nietzsche claims, because it redeems the essentially cruel nature of existence with beauty, thus making life worth living. In order to unpack this argument, I will first analyze Nietzsche’s metaphysics and its relationship to Greek tragedy. Second, I will consider an alternative justification for life that Nietzsche raises, namely a scientific one, and examine the reasons for why Nietzsche rejects it. Finally, I will assess whether Nietzsche’s central claim is plausible. My argument is that there is some truth in what Nietzsche says.

In order to understand Nietzsche’s analysis of Greek art, one must first understand his metaphysics. At this point in Nietzsche’s philosophical development, his metaphysical views were very much indebted to Schopenhauer, as evidenced by the abundant quotes from The World As Will and Representation. On this metaphysical view, the everyday world is merely a phenomenon, while behind the phenomenon lies a reality that is normally veiled from human experience. Nietzsche sees a correspondence in Greek mythology, with Apollo as the god of phenomenon, since in Greek mythology, Apollo is the god of light and appearances. On the other hand, Dionysus corresponds to the underlying reality that is veiled from human beings.

To flesh out the character of these two worlds, Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer’s image of the sailor in the storm. In the image, the sailor in a boat represents human beings in the world of phenomenon, while the raging sea storms around him represents the the underlying reality. Again Nietzsche finds a correspondence to Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo, as the god of sculptor, represents the forms of things: it is through Apollo that things can appear to human beings. Thus, Apollo, according to Nietzsche, is the embodiment of “principium indivudationis” (21), or the principle of individuation, because without Apollo, individual things and beings cannot appear to us. In contrast, Dionysus, like the raging sea, is the god of the underlying reality, because the underlying reality is essentially without form. Individual things and human beings do not exist in this world because there are no forms to distinguish one thing from another. Therefore, the Dionysian world is one of “complete self-oblivion” (22). So whereas Apollo represents the stability of appearances and our ability to cognize individual things and people in the phenomenal world, Dionysus represents the underlying reality of chaos, formlessness, and all-encompassing unity.

However, the underlying Dionysian reality, like the raging storm which threatens to overwhelm the individual, is horrific to behold. Drawing on Greek mythology once more, Nietzsche uses the words of Silenus, Dionysus’ companion, to demonstrate the true nature of existence: “the very best of all things is completely beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing” (27). Silenus’ words not only show the terror of existence, but also demonstrate the Dionysian tendency to obliterate the individual to nothingness. Nietzsche contends that the Greeks understood the horrifying nature of existence “with its eternal suffering and contradiction” (30), as evidenced by the many stories of suffering in Greek mythology: Prometheus, Oedipus, Orestes, etc.

Yet how to explain the Greek love of life in the face of the knowledge of a terrifying existence? It is the Apollonian drives of the Greek, Nietzsche argues, that enabled them to tolerate and even celebrate existence. In order to tolerate existence, the Greeks created the Olympian gods whose lives form “the ideal image of their [Greek’s] own existence” (27). It is the Apollonian “drive towards beauty” (28) which created the gods, because “it was in the dreams that the magnificent forms of the gods first appeared” (19). In their gods, the Greeks were able to tolerate existence because they see the gods as the ideals to strive toward, an endeavor that “seduces the living into living on” (28). Thus, the Apollonian instinct created the gods as a kind of veil to shield themselves against the Dionysian substratum reality of suffering and terror. In this way, the Greeks were both cognizant of the Dionysian reality of suffering and yet at the same time “have the delightful vision, the pleasurable appearance, for its continual redemption” (30). Through this unity, Nietzsche argues, the Greeks learned to love life, affirming its aesthetic pleasures while also recognizing its essentially tragic nature.

Nowhere is this unity more manifest, according to Nietzsche, than Greek tragedy, which combines the Apollonian and the Dionysian in various forms: words and music, hero and chorus, respectively. The Apollonian individual hero, who always speak his lines, is essentially the individuated “masks of that original hero Dionysus” (59). The hero ultimately gains insight into the Dionysian reality of suffering and tragedy, best exemplified by Oedipus, who gains knowledge of the ultimately cruel nature of existence. With the destruction of the individual, man is once again reunited with that original unity, and he experiences “an overpowering feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature” (45). Therefore, what the tragic chorus demonstrates shows the Greeks is that “life at the bottom of things, in spite of the passing of the phenomena, remains indestructibly powerful” (45). Through the negation of the individual hero and the music of the eternal chorus, the Greeks were able to glimpse into the true nature of reality without being destroyed by it.

However, Nietzsche sees the emergence of Socrates as tolling the death knells of Greek tragedy. In Socrates, Nietzsche sees a new type of person for whom “knowledge is virtue” (70). This type of theoretical man, Nietzsche argues, is contrary to the Greek pessimistic spirit, because the theoretical man believes that “by following the guiding threat of causality, thought reaches into the deepest abysses of being and is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being” (82). Thus, Socratism offers an alternative justification for existence: as an epistemological, as opposed to aesthetic, phenomenon. Instead of justifying living through art, the theoretical man justifies living through the search for knowledge.

But this effort is doomed to fail, Nietzsche argues, because eventually the theoretical man discovers limits to knowledge. Nietzsche claims that the drive for knowledge will result in “tragic knowledge” (84), which is to say that the theoretical man will discover the underlying Dionysian reality of suffering. However, “insight into the horrific truth, outweighs any motive leading to action” (46) because of the realization that “action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things” (46). Without art, the theoretical man has no real motivation to act once he has understood the Dionysian reality. It is art alone which “can reshape the disgust at the thought of the horrific or absurd aspects of life into notions with which it is possible to live” (46). But because theoretical optimism has destroyed the pessimistic spirit which makes art possible, the theoretical man has nothing to protect himself against this overwhelming, unbearable Dionysian suffering, unlike the Greeks.

In light of Nietzsche’s argument, how is one to assess the original claim: that life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. First, how are we to take Nietzsche’s essentially pessimistic view of existence? I agree with him in the sense that the individual is ultimately insignificant since everyone dies. Thus, each individual life is short, insignificant, and probably miserable. A knowledge of this fact can and does lead to depression in some people, namely, the recognition that no matter how hard one tries, one cannot change the nature of existence. Without appealing to some source of transcendental meaning, for instance God, it is hard to see the significance of human existence in the universe.

Second, I agree with Nietzsche that knowledge does not really make life any more bearable. In fact, knowledge is likely to do the opposite: make one more aware of the futility of knowledge. For example, common wisdom often repeats that we must study history in order to prevent past tragedies. But is that really the case? For example, the history of the Holocaust is now well-known, yet in the past 50 years genocides have been repeated, in Rwanda and now in Darfur. Therefore, I agree with Nietzsche that knowledge by itself is impotent to motivate action to change things.

Finally, I think the claim that life is only justified aesthetically can be interpreted in two ways. First, one can interpret the claim as saying that art offers consolation in the face of tragedy by depicting it. For example, Michaelangelo’s Pieta depicts a scene of intense suffering and sorrow, but it offers an almost spiritual comfort through Michaelangelo’s masterful sculpting work, thus expressing a Dionysian tragedy through the Apollonian art of sculpture. A second way of interpreting the original claim is to say that what is meant is that the individual must treat his life as an artist--using life as the material from which he can find his own meaning. He can’t find some pre-existing, eternal, transcendental meaning by searching for it with knowledge or religion. Rather, he must create, like an artist, his own meaning for existence. If interpreted this way, Nietzsche’s claim could be seen as a proto-existentialist philosophy.

What Qualifies Me To Vote?

2008-03-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

This has been something that I have been thinking about for the entire duration of the election: in what meaningful sense am I qualified to vote based on the policy prescriptions of the candidates in an epistemological uncertain environment?

In other words: how am I qualified to vote if I don't know shit about the candidates' policies?

And by "knowing" the candidates' policies, I do not mean knowing just what they are, but actually how they work, what their rationales are, what evidence they have presented, and what empirical consequences their proposed policies might have, and finally, what alternative policies have been put forth.

I set the bar for "knowing" this high because I think it is nowhere near enough to know what their policies are. For instance, in the Democratic primary elections, it is not enough to "know" that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have policies that will supposedly achieve universal healthcare coverage, because if you already value universal healthcare as a policy goal, such as I do, then this knowledge nothing to tell you how you ought to decide between them.

But let's go to a higher level of abstraction: what qualifies me to think that universal healthcare is desirable? In asking myself this question, there are both deontological and utilitarian considerations that I have to take into account. First, I might have deontological reasons to think that widespread access to healthcare promotes an important moral value. Second, however, there might be utilitarian considerations that could possibly demonstrate that a government-run universal healthcare program might not promote the value that I want, or might not do it in a way that is consonant with other moral values that I might have.

Again, it is apparent to me that it is not enough just to know what moral values I want promoted, but also to know the actual, empirical policies so that I can decide whether those policies promote my moral values in a way consistent with my other moral values, or even whether such policies promote my moral value in any effective, meaningful manner.

The problem lies in this: I do not have the necessary knowledge to take into account the utilitarian considerations of any given public policy. In this specific case, I have no idea whose healthcare policy would best promote my desired value of widespread access to healthcare; nor do I have the policy knowledge to decide whose policies promote that value in a way that is most consistent with my overall value framework.

I do not have any advanced degrees in the relevant fields, such as economics, public health, or public policy. If I were to look at the candidates' white papers, I would be lost. If I were to look at the raw data from which the candidates drew their policy conclusions, I would also be unable to make sense of them.

Furthermore, I cannot turn to experts to settle the question, because the experts disagree. Some say that Obama and Clinton have no meaningful differences when it comes to their healthcare policies; others say that there are. Some say that one candidates' policy is better than the other, while others reject both candidates' policies altogether and propose their own alternatives.

Again, to whom should I turn to settle the question? Surely the answer cannot be a higher set of experts, because that would go into an infinite regress. In order to stop this regress, I would have to be able to make my own decision. But the question still remains: what qualifies me to make a meaningful judgment about the experts' judgments if I lack the qualification to make a direct judgment on the policies themselves?

And if I cannot use knowledge to arbitrate between experts, what else is left to me? Ideology? Perhaps; after all, that is how many people decide whom to trust. To oversimplify a bit, a voter who lack the necessary knowledge might trust the conclusions of the Heritage Foundation if his political tendency leans to the right.

But this method of deciding whom to trust is arbitrary: there is no necessary or logical connection between the empirical claims made by someone and their ideology. I might be politically left-leaning, but I cannot make any kind of a priori argument that an expert at the American Enterprise Institute is never to be trusted and that an expert at The Brookings Institute is to be always trusted.

So again, I am left the question: how am I to decide? Again I am left with no reliable method of determining which candidates and which policies would promote moral values important to me in the most effective way that is consistent with my other moral values.

Thus, I am forced to conclude that I, for all intents and purposes, do not have the qualifications to make choices of healthcare policies.

Connected with that conclusion is my continual and increasing doubts about the basis of legitimacy for democratic voting procedures. If the policies that affect the state are increasingly scientific and technical, based more and more on empirical evidence and considerations, then what makes democratic procedures legitimate if most of the participants cannot consider the evidence which make up policy prescriptions?

The Weekly 10 #4

2008-03-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

For the week of February 25th, I am cheating, because there are only 9 tracks in this week's update, and they all come from Nine Inch Nail's latest instrumental EP titled "Ghost I-IV."

Under the Creative Commons license, Trent Reznor released the 9 tracks of Ghost I for free, so this is actually a legal download.

My first impression is very favorable: these songs compare favorably to the instrumental songs on The Fragile. Two weeks ago, in the very first Weekly 10 update that I did, I wrote:

I happen to think that Trent Reznor is a much better composer than he is a lyricist, since some of his lyrics border on the ridiculously juvenile/emo angst, which is kinda embarrassing for a guy who's approaching middle age.

Two weeks later, Trent Reznor drops an all instrumental album, as if he heard my complaint. I thank him, because this time around, I don't have to deal with Trent Reznor the "angry young man" who's pushing middle age, but Trent Reznor the excellent musical composer.

These tracks run the gamut of almost everything Trent Reznor has done: sparse to claustrophic, minimal to epic, melodic to pure noise, sometimes all in the same song.

My favorite thus far, albeit likely to change, is track 6. And the reason is because it prominently features the theremin. I love the theremin: how it sounds, how it looks, and how it's played, especially if the theremin player looks something like this. I guess I just have an affinity for early electronic instruments, like the Ondes Martenot.

I also applaud Trent Reznor for trying to change the business model with this release: multi-tiered pricing options that give maximum flexibility to the fans with no DRM and encoded in high quality lossless formats, complete with a well-produced PDF booklet. It is about high time that artists like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead tried to get the music industry into the 21st century, and this is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. I can only hope that other major label artists follow suit.

What Are My Moral Obligations Toward My Barista?

2008-02-29T15:46:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, like every other afternoon, I went to Peet's Coffee on the corner of Telegraph and Blake, ordered my usual--a large coffee with room for cream--from the barista who usually works there at this time of the day: an attractive brunette who is way out of my league.

Maybe that is the reason I keep going there at that time...hmm...

Anyways, after getting my coffee, I sat down and started re-reading Kant's Groundworks for the Metaphysics of Morals in preparation for my seminar paper. And I came upon Kant's Formula of Humanity as End In Itself:

Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.

And that's when it struck me that in most of my daily interactions with other people, I have failed to live up to this particular formulation of the categorical imperative. This, of course, led to further thinking about what this formulation actually entails.

First, this formulation of the CI is a positive formulation because it states that a moral agent can never treat other people as merely means, which implies that there is something additional that the moral agent must do in order to satisfy the formula of the humanity as end in itself.

Now, the problem for me is this: what does this "additional" act entail? In other words, what is the substance of treating someone as an end in himself? What must we actually do to satisfy the requirement of the CI?

This is problematic because most of our interactions with other people, at least from my phenomenological observations, do not satisfy this requirement.

Take my interaction with the barista: this is hardly an isolated incident. People like me all across the country deal with their baristas this way: they pay the barista to make them a caffine-based drink, using the barista as a means. The same can be said to almost everyone working in the service industry: bus drivers, dry-cleaners, bus boys, waiters, teachers, masseuses, janitors, cashiers, the list goes on.

In these interactions, it is very unclear how we have treated these people as ends in themselves. On the surface, these interactions are almost purely instrumental: we engage with these people to get something for ourselves, whether it's a service or a good. Similarly, they engage with us in an instrumental manner: they get financial compensation for the services/goods they provide us.

So in these cases, how do we treat them as ends in themselves?

The easier solution might be simply to bite the bullet and concede that these kind of interactions are immoral because they failed to satisfy the categorical imperative. But I suspect that intuitively, we would not characterize such interactions as immoral.

Now the question becomes: why not? In other words, can we interpret the formulation of humanity as end in itself in a way as to render these interactions moral in the Kantian sense?

I think there is, but this interpretation is entirely abstract. We can think of ourselves as treating our baristas, dry-cleaners, waiters, etc. as ends in themselves by acknowledging, in a conceptual sense, their autonomy as human beings. That is, we conceptually accept that these people have their own interests and ends, that they lead substantial lives outside of this limited context in which we interact with them, that their person is inviolate. I say that this is an abstract interpretation because in reality, we really have no idea what their personal interests and ends are, we have no way of seeing them as fully human because our only interactive context with them is one of service and exchange.

But even this interpretation is inadequate for me, because we have still not cashed out the substantive notion of the formula of humanity as end in itself that the formulation implies. In fact it is not clear to me how a substantive conception is possible. Notice that in my abstract intrepretation of the formulation, we only treat people as ends in themselves in a negative sense: by NOT thinking of them as purely means.

So now, I have no idea what my actual, substantive moral obligations are to the barista at Peet's Coffee.

Astrology and Congressional Voting Behavior

2008-02-27T22:26:00.000-08:00

You learn something everyday: for instance, did you know that you could sort Congressional roll-call votes on the Washington Post by, of all things, astrological sign?

I found this out while working at my internship today. I had to look up how the House voted on H.R. 5351, titled "Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008." What a mouthful, try saying that quickly three times.

When I found out that I could sort the vote by astrological sign, I was confounded. After all, what is the point of being able to sort by astrological sign? Is the Washington Post suggesting that there could possibly be a correlation between a Congress member's voting behavior and his/her astrology?

But who knows, this could be an interesting research experiment. I would not be the least bit surprised if some poor, debt-ridden, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking, starving poli sci grad student has already designed this experiment.

If not, then this post will serve as a reminder for me to design my own experiment when I go into grad school.

Who knows, maybe with enough empirical data, we might one day find out what exactly is the connection of being born in a certain time of the year and the tendency to oppose modifying the IRS revenue code to give incentive to companies producing renewable energy.

It's Funny 'Cause It's True

2008-02-26T22:44:00.000-08:00

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

And finally, in case you ever needed to explain to an infant the basic tenets of neoliberalism from a Marxist perspective, I have the video for you, with sock puppets and a abrupt interruption from the Online Porn Monster.

The Abstractification of Iraq

2008-02-25T20:21:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know "abstractification" is not a real word, but I made it up to make a point about how public elites and opinion-makers on both the left and the right have treated Iraq: as a pure abstraction unconnected to the concrete, empirical facts on the ground.

This was brought up when I had a conversation today with someone, and in any conversation with me, politics is never far away. Eventually the topic came to Iraq, and this is what my interlocutor had to say: "in the sense that Iraq has been an abstraction and something to argue, belittle, and roll one's eyes about."

That comment struck me as especially true, because the war itself has become anything but the war: it has become a concept, a blank slate onto which different people project different things. I realized just how abstract the war has become when it's being used by both the Berkeley military protestors and Frank Rich when he compared the war to Hillary's presidential campaign.

In other words, the war has lost pretty much all "real" significance to the opinion-makers and public elites back home; instead, the war has become a concept that can be used in whatever arguments that they wish to make.

This is essentially George Packer's argument in this World Affairs Journal piece. In that piece, he argues that "In the United States, the war is an abstraction that routinely shades into caricature. For all the television news coverage, Americans have the slimmest sense of what the war actually feels and looks like."

That is precisely the case: we are very disconnected from the war, and we hardly know what is going on the ground, which is ironic, considering the fact that if we wanted to, we could watch the war coverage in the media for 24 hours non-stop, because that's how much "information" there is right now on the war.

The implication of this abstractification of the war is that "Each side picked and chose from its own catalogue of facts, and one’s opinion about everything from body armor to body counts was decided accordingly."

The most damning argument comes when Packer says that, "In a sense, they believed or refused to believe each story before it was published, even before it occurred. There wasn’t a moment’s pause to digest information, much less to weigh facts dispassionately; objectivity wasn’t even an aspiration. What mattered was whether the facts supported the theory or not. Throughout the opinion classes, the impulse to keep a little part of the brain open to inconvenient facts seemed to have been extinguished. In magazine offices, bloggers’ bedrooms, Hollywood studios, and the White House, a fantasy war was underway, a demonstration of American virtue or a series of crimes against humanity—both of them self-serving fictions."

That pretty much sums it up as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not saying that I have been innocent either. After all, the tendency to conceptualize and make abstract is indelibly human, but after 5 years, it really does look like the war has been emptied of its empirical character, instead assuming an entirely political/abstract one.

But this is of course only from our perspective, the people who are not affected by the war, who can view the war from a safe distance. For the people actually involved in the war--the soldiers and the civilians--the war is hardly a "concept"; it is fucking real and happening NOW, and will continue to happen for decades to come.

So the next time you hear the incessant, endless debates about whether the surge is working or not, whether we should gradually or quickly withdrawal, blah blah blah, just try to remember that we have no fucking clue what it's like to be in the middle of it, that perhaps we should exercise a little epistemological scepticism when bombarded by pundits and elites from the left and right.

Frank Rich's Irresponsible Op-Ed on Hillary

2008-02-25T16:35:00.000-08:00

Man, Frank Rich has really reached a new low, even for him: in this op-ed piece in the New York Times, he compares Hillary's management of her campaign to the Bush administration's management of the Iraq War.

In the op-ed, Rich says that Hillary has employed "a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan."

Really now Frank Rich? You are REALLY going to compare Hillary's campaign to a war which cost the country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and our international image? Really, is Hillary's campaign THAT bad?

Sure, I acknowledge that a part of a columnist's job is to provoke, to be polemical, but this is way out of line. It not only insults Hillary, but also the soldiers who gave their lives in the war. How can Frank Rich in good conscience argue that the two are similar?

I mean, this is just unprofessional. I might make this kind of argument just for the sake of provoking people, but that's because I am not a paid, professional writer with a nationally-syndicated column read by millions of people around the world. I mean, I might write something like this just for something tongue-in-cheek, but Frank Rich looks like he's actually serious.

Either he's really sandbagging all his readers, or he is just irresponsible. I lean toward the latter.

Now, for a different point of view, I give you this Tiny Fey segment on last weekend's SNL, in which she counters some common (and baseless) arguments made against Hillary, much like I did a while ago.

See, this is why I like Tina Fey: not only is she attractive, she's smart as hell and not afraid to show it. And plus, it is just a bitingly funny sketch.

The Weekly 10 #3

2008-02-24T21:20:00.000-08:00

Man, the week of February 18th kinda blew, mostly because of the shitty weather. Just when I thought the rain is over, it comes back with a fucking vengeance. The songs here reflect the rain, in various ways, some literal, some figurative, while others just reminded me of certain feelings which I associate with the rain.

Anyways, to get the songs mentioned here, click this link for the download.

1) The Allman Brothers Band - Stormy Monday
A cover of a T-Bone Walker song from Live At Fillmore East, one of my all time favorite live rock records.

2) Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
From the album of the same title. I have to confess that I am immensely attracted to Neko Case. After all, what is not to like: immensely talented, a smart lyricist, and a red-head, seals the deal as far as I'm concerned.

3) Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood
Again, you can see my semi-obsession with flooding this week; perhaps it reflects an apocalyptic frame of mind. Anyways, I started listening to the blues because of SRV, and this song just rocks. This is also from the album of the same name. It should be familiar if you've played Guitar Hero.

4) Nick Drake - Pink Moon
This is for Wednesday night's full lunar eclipse. Too bad the weather in Berkeley didn't let me see shit. Oh well. This is a very stark and haunting song: just Nick Drake's voice, guitar, and piano. From the last official album he released.

5) Prince - Purple Rain
An oldie but a fucking goodie. This song is epic. And Prince does not get enough credit for his guitar skills. From the album of the same title.

6) Ryan Adams - Damn Sam (I Love A Woman That Rains)
I like the first line of the song: as a man I ain't never been much for sunny days. From his first album.

7) The Bad Plus - Smells Like Teen Spirit
It would have been Kurt Cobain's birthday last week had he lived. So this is in his memory. I can't really categorize The Bad Plus as jazz-fusion because they don't really use any electronic instruments. But they are not straight up jazz either. It's more like a mix of hard-rock, especially the drumming, and jazz. Anyways, it is a pretty good take on the song from this album of theirs.

8) Miles Davis - In A Silent Way/It's About That Time
This one is in memory of Teo Macero, Miles' producer for those initial fusion records that revolutionized jazz. He produced both In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, and to me, Teo Macero is Miles Davis' George Martin, because without him, those albums would not sound the way they do. He really used the studio as an instrument in the composition of the music. This is from In A Silent Way, which to me is the electric counter-part to Kind of Blue. I personally like this album better than Bitches Brew, which is not to say that Bitches Brew doesn't fucking rock, but I like the almost understated playing, especially by John McLaughlin, whose playing is almost soulful, unlike on Bitches Brew when he just seems to shred it for the sake of shredding it.

9) Thom Yorke - And It Rained All Night
From Thom Yorke's solo album. A very paranoid song for those times when you are up at 3 in the morning while it rains incessantly outside, pounding the windows.

10) Arvo Part - Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Pay attention to the bells, so funeral-like, a dirge in the rain, or a procession of mourners marching in a slight drizzle. This is from a recording of Tabula Rasa.

So as you can see, this was a week characterized by bad weather and death, so these songs reflected some of that mood. But it's not all doom and gloom, not yet anyways.

Chinese Buffets: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts

2008-02-24T01:43:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time living in the Chinese American community knows exactly what I am talking about when I speak of Chinese buffets.

Typically, Chinese buffets look something like this:

Now, it would in fact be a slight misnomer to call such a place a "Chinese" buffet. The more technically correct term would be pan-Asian, since these buffets usually include things like sushi. It would even be wrong to call it pan-"Asian", since they also include stuff like french fries and chicken nuggets.

You might say that the existence, and more importantly, the proliferation, of these kind of buffets reflect the Asian American experience: of the developments and evolutions of traditional Asian cuisine that was modified by Asian immigrants in America. You might even say that these places represent the successful fusion of East meets West, and that their success is something that the Asian American community should be proud of.

I call bullshit on that.

First, let us describe the scene at hand. Imagine this: it is Friday night at dinner time, after people have gotten off from work. You see families going into these buffets--the wife, kids, mini-van, everything. Now, picture the food: a mix mash of poorly cooked food, dumped into pans, arranged in a trough-like fashion in aisles, saturated with grease and oil, permeated with too much salt. In other words, mediocrity on a platter. Of course no such buffet can miss out on such "authentic" Chinese dishes as such as orange chicken, spring rolls that are cooked with too much frying oil, brocoli beef, and most importantly, chicken nuggets. Sushi that has been left there for too long, and hot-n-sour soup that is either too hot or too sour.

Second, let us describe the actors of this theatre: middle-class families who are too lazy to cook on a Friday night. Hungry, all of them, of course. Their eyes, ravenous; their feet, quick and nimble, ready to go on the prowl at the slightest hint. They are only too ready to line up around the aisles, like so many pigs waiting for food to come down the trough. Just look at the architectural arrangement of these buffets: the food is arranged in a trough-like manner, with people gathering on both sides, plates in hand, ready to devour whatever comes.

Third, let us describe the action with which we are concerned: feeding behavior. Imagine one of those time-lapsed videos on the Discovery Channel showing a colony of small animals, usually ants, or sea creatures, that devour the carcass of a much larger animal. That is how people at these buffets, except you don't need time-lapse photography because it happens quickly enough on its own in real time.

And as a biologist/anthropologist, let me point out which food items would most likely excite this behavior, and describe the process. First, a hapless waiter, probably someone who has lost a bet, comes out of the kitchen holding a pan filled with one of the following things: steamed whole fish, crab legs, or lobsters. Now, the waiter is shifting his/her eyes, trying to ward off the throng of ravenous predators gathering around the trough, eyes all looking at the pan with the food. Once the pan is put in place, feeding commences, with great speed, speed which seems almost inconceivable. Within minutes, two at most, the steamed fish/crab legs/lobster is gone, and the predators wander off.

In other words, it looks something a lot like the following video:

That concludes the ceremony.

Money Talks...

2008-02-22T01:25:00.000-08:00

And it also helps you win elections.

This New York Times piece examines the just released campaign finance report by the Clinton camp, and it looks like the Clinton campaign simply did not have the financial parity to compete with the Obama campaign.

A telling statistic: Obama outspent Clinton by $4 million from Jan. 5th to Feb. 5th on political advertisements, which translated into 3,000 more advertisements for his campaign.

And beneath Obama's talk of changing Washington and reducing the effect of money in politics, the reality is that he spent $2.8 million dollars on political consulting.

This is why I can never understand the criticism leveled against Clinton to the effect that she's too poll-driven. Well, guess what, everyone who is running for office is poll-driven: that is a necessity of the game.

People tend to forget the on the ground, day to day logistics of running a campaign, and for better or worse, that aspect of the election is almost entirely dependent on money.

So let me offer a plausible, if prosaic explanation for why Obama has a leg up on Clinton right now: he has more money than she does.

Iraq: Why Hindsight Is A Bitch

2008-02-20T22:24:00.000-08:00

For the Political Science 2 course that I'm teaching, I've had to read an article in the course reader, taken from The New Yorker. It was a piece (subscription required) by Nicholas Lemann entitled "What Terrorists Want: Is There A Better Way to Defeat Al Qaeda?" For those interested, the hard copy of this article is in the October 29, 2001 issue of the magazine. I searched the Berkeley library for an electronic copy but came up empty.

Anyways, I bring up this piece from "ancient" history because the article seems so ironic nowadays. In the article, Lemann interviews a bunch of anti-terrorism experts, ranging from professional academics to think-tank residents about what they think are the best strategies to counter terrorism.

The heuristic point of the article--the reason why the professor assigned this reading to the class--is to demonstrate that terrorism is an essentially political phenomenon, undertaken by political actors with distinctly political motives and interests.

But what is so ironic, and even absurd, about the article is its last section, when Lemann describes a conversation he had with Kenneth Adelman, one of the neo-con architects of the Iraq War. Lemann asks Adelman what are this thoughts on how to fight back against Al Qaeda, and Adelman essentially lays out two approaches: the "narrow" and the "wide" approach.

The "narrow" approach would be just to limit the mission to bin Laden, going after his organization only. The "wide" approach, Adelman says, is to go after the governments that sponsor terrorist networks. Although this is never explicitly stated, anyone can, with hindsight, plainly see a very early articulation of the Bush doctrine.

In the article, Adelman is quoted as saying that "the big enchilada is Iraq." He lays out some pros and cons of going into Iraq. On the con side, he says that "there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in nine-eleven" and that "the coalition won't support us." Just stop and think those quotes for a moment. Just think about it.

Adelman goes on to say that on the pro side, "if we're going after international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and states that support both, Iraq comes up three cherries."

Again, I ask you to stop and just read that quote over one more time.

And the most hiliarious/heartbreaking/ironic/tragic/absurd moment is not yet here. In the very next paragraph, Lemann asks Adelman how he would pitch the idea to Bush, and here I will quote Adelman's entire response. Remember, this is an EXACT quote, so all emphasis are present in the original quotation.

"This is a historic moment. You have a mission. It is almost a divine mission. You have one tasks in life. That is to wage a global campaign against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Unlike any of your predecessors, including Harry Truman at the beginning of the Cold War, you have no public opposition, no congressional opposition, and meaningful foreign opposition. It is a noble, wonderful mission. Our children's lives will be better for it. You are given the opportunity by tragedy to solve the larger problem. It is virtually impossible to wipe out terrorist groups, but, by God, you can wipe out countries that support terrorism. There are two countries that are not easy picking, but not tough--Afghanistan and Iraq. I have no evidence that Iraq was involved in nine-eleven, but I feel it. There is no reason you can't use these ideal conditions to help fulfill your mission."

Again, I ask you to just stop and think about that for a moment. Just think about what Adelman said, in print.

Sometimes we all take the war for granted, since it has been with us for a long time, but it absolutely, positively blows my mind that some six years ago, these kind of rhetoric were not the exception but the norm.

Of course we are now afforded the luxury of hindsight, and realize just how grotesque, how grossly wrong Adelman's statements were. It absolutely blows my mind that someone who explicitly acknowledges, not once, but TWICE, that he has no evidence linking Iraq with 9/11, can still justify a pre-emptive war against Iraq based on FEELINGS. Feelings people, feelings.

Three words: UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE.

So after six years, when thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians have died, when priceless cultural artifacts are lost, when billions and trillions of dollars have been spent, when all of our international goodwill utterly exhausted, we come back to this article.

We come to the realization that once upon a time not so long ago, these words actually came out of people's mouths. And then you realize just how absurd this war has become, how absurd its roots were, and how its management was one of incompetence and gross errors.

This is why we can never forget history.

Obama and Clinton: Two Conceptions of Politics

2008-02-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

It is an interesting coincidence that while the Democratic presidential nomination is going on, I am simultaneously taking a political philosophy class organized around the question of what is politics?

One conception of politics depicts politics as what we would today typically think of as "political," namely the struggle for power, negotiations, compromises, etc. The other conception of politics, which isn't mainstream but is by no means extinct in America, is what I would tentatively call a republican conception of politics. By republican I do not mean to refer to the political party or its ideology. Rather, I mean a conception of politics that goes all the way back to Aristotle, a view of politics as an activity taken up by the citizentry as a whole to achieve the common good.

Another way of stating the distinction is to say that the first conception is formal or procedural, while the latter is substantive or normative.

Thus far, it looks to me Hillary Clinton has consistently offered a formal conception of politics in her speeches. She constantly emphasizes that she has had the political experience, that her tenure as the First Lady and Senator has taught her how to achieve her political ends, that she is best equipped to fight the inevitable "Swift-boating" of the Republicans. What she is trying to say, at least I think, is that she is well-trained in the craft of politics: the sheer struggle for power, the maneuvers needed to get what one wants, the skills necessary to cope with inevitable conflict. This kind of rhetoric suggests that Clinton thinks that politics is just a process in which conflicts over power happen, and that if Democrats want their policies implemented, they need someone who is a realist politician, in the Machiavellian sense. Note that I am not using the word "Machiavellian" in a pejorative sense.

Obama, on the other hand, seems to me to offer a "republican" conception of politics; that is: politics as a collective, communal effort to achieve some good. Thus, he constantly emphasizes politics as an unified endeavor that transcends mere partisan struggle for interest and power. He is much more likely to invoke the fact that politics is a process of people's coming together to do good for the entire community. This is a message that has consistently appeared in all of his speeches. The "change" that he constantly alludes to is not so much a change as a harkening back to republican ideals of collective action in the pursuit of some public good, an ideal that goes as far back as Aristotle.

Coincidentally, or perhaps rightly so, both the realist and the republican conception of politics, as exemplified by Clinton and Obama, find expression in Machiavelli. Machiavelli's realist elements come out most famously in The Prince, but his republican ideals are just as strongly expressed in a less-known, but no less important work, The Discourses On Livy.

The fact that the realist and the republican conceptions of politics are united in Machiavelli is important for one reason: mainly to show that the criticisms directed toward both Clinton and Obama all miss important aspects of politics. Politics is neither strictly republican nor strictly realist: it includes both. Thus, the criticism of Hillary as power-monger misses the point that politics is at a minimum about the struggle for power. The criticism of Obama as someone who's all bark and no bite misses the point that politics is not merely a struggle for power.

It's important to recognize that these two conceptions of politics need not be inherently irreconcilable, that any conception of politics which overstates one or the other do not really capture what politics is.

So once again I go back to my previous point: that the criticisms against both candidates are in some ways baseless. I see both of them as offering a distinct conception of politics, each one just as valid and necessary as the other. Ideally I would like to see them run as a team, because that would unite these two strands of political thinking. However, the prospect of that is not likely because of the apparent hostility between the two, which is surely going to increase now that the Clinton camp believes that the only way they are going to be viable is to become much more negative in its tone and rhetoric.

Lost: An Exercise in Faith and Scepticism

2008-02-18T21:25:00.000-08:00

Lost is undoubtedly a show about the struggle between faith and scepticism. It is to me the central theme that runs beneath the show. Everything turns upon acts of faith: Locke's pushing the button, Charlie's self-sacrifice, etc.

Of course the flip side of the coin is the scepticism: that everything on the island makes no sense, that there is no "answer" that will neatly wrap up everything. This scepticism is embodied by Jack, who argues with Locke that pushing the button is useless.

Pushing the button in Lost assumes an almost Sisphusian dimension: Locke must push the button over and over again. But of course the creators throw a wrench into the whole thing by making Locke doubt himself, just like Desmond did. Desmond questioned why he can't get outside the hatch, and by disobeying, he made the plane crash. The show is not clear on the full implication of Locke's disobedience.

Now, Locke regains his faith and starts to trust everything that he gets from the island, from Walt, from Jacob.

The faith vs. scepticism dialectic also plays itself out on a meta-level among the show's viewers. I know so many people who gave up on Lost because they simply got tired of the fact that the show asks more questions than it answers. They think that there is no possible way that the show can end by wrapping up all the loose ends.

Then there are those who has some kind of faith in the show, faith that all the random, inexplicable stuff (like the smoke monster and the polar bears) will all be explained. In a way, they are almost like millenarians, believing that the end is near, that an answer must be given. The fact that the producers have said that the show will definite end in two years have helped them in their faith.

But then there are people like me, who doesn't believe that a definite end date indicates a definite ending. I would not be the least surprised if the producers simply left stuff hanging, as an act of post-modern concluding the show, even more so than how the Sopranos ended.

Of course this ending will piss off many people, but not me, because if I were the show's producer, I would probably fuck with people and see how they react.

The Weekly 10 #2

2008-02-18T00:04:00.001-08:00

This is for the week of February 11th, 2008: click here for the zip containing the songs.

1) Air - Brakes On
The last track from Premier Symptomes. This song has no special significance, other than the fact that it's fun to listen to, what with the Beatlemania samples and the beatlesque vocals in the song.

2) The Beach Boys - Sloop John B
This is from Pet Sounds, arguably one of the greatest albums of all time. This song just sounds gorgeous. Brian Wilson once again proves himself to be a fucking genius.
3) Beck - Bottle of Blues
This is a song from Mutations, which I happen to think is underrated in Beck's catalogue. It has quitely become my favorite Beck album, the one that I listen to the most. I get a Dylan-esque vibe from the song, from its wacky surrealist imagery (holding hands with an impotent dream?), and it's folky/psychedelic sound.

4) Charles Mingus - Better Git It In Your Soul
The first cut from Mingus Ah Um. This has a really vigorous feel to it, and it just sounds very energetic and joyful. Plus I love the fact that Mingus, when he's not plucking his bass, is just off on the side yelling and humming like crazy. It makes the whole song like a totally rocking jam session.

5) Elliott Smith - Miss Misery (early version)
This is from New Moon, a two-disc album containing previously unreleased stuff from his catalogue. I include this song because one night last week I was drinking Johnnie Walker, and I remembered that the first line of this song is "I can fake it through the day with a bottle of Johnnie Walker red." You can tell that this track is a demo because of the lo-fi production, but the spirit of the song nonetheless comes through.

6) Lightnin' Hopkins, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry - Walk On
This is just a very good blues number, check out the harmonica playing by Sonny Terry.

7) Nat King Cole - Orange Colored Sky
This is from a greatest hits collection that is mastered by Steve Hoffman, probably the best audio engineer who's really dedicated to sound quality. That dedication can be heard on this track, as the dynamic is off the charts. Crank up the song and be prepared to be startled when the brass section comes in.

8) Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
This track shares the title of Neutral Milk Hotel's magnum opus, which came out ten years ago on February 10th, 1998. I cannot overstate how influential this record has become, not to mention the fact that it has become one of my proverbial desert-island discs. And this song demonstrates why I like it so much: infectiously catchy melodies dressed up in layers and layers of distortion, weird instrumentation (check out the musical saw, trombones), Jeff Magnum's off-key but sincere singing, the surrealist imagery that nonetheless express some very intense emotions, and just a sheer sense of wonder. This song contains one of my favorite lyrics of all time: "How strange it is to be anything at all." That says it all man, that says it all.

9) The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?
The lead single from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Like "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea," this song also expresses a Nietzschean sentiment: that despite all the tragedy in the world, life goes on: it's the eternal recurrence. That's why Wayne sings that the sun doesn't go down, just an illusion caused by the world's spinning around.
10) The Beastie Boys - 3 Minute Rule
From Paul's Boutique, which to me is one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time. Although this album has received a lot of critical praise, I don't think an average mainstream Beastie Boys fan would know this album that well, which is a shame really. An album like this can't be made today, simply because of the draconian interpretation of copyright laws. It's really a lucky coincidence that they were able to make this album before copyright law really tightened.

I love this track because of the production: there are just so many layers to dissect. And second, this song contains some of the most hiliarious/brash lines I've heard in a rap song. For example, "Your boyfriend doesn't know about me and your mother", or " I've been making records since you were sucking on your mother's dick", and finally, a Jack Kerouac reference: " While I'm reading on the road by my man Jack Kerouac". This is what I love about this album--so many references to unexpected things in a rap context. How many other rappers do you know that can make references to Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix, AND Dragnet in the same song? Not very many.

Why the Rap Against both Hillary and Obama is Baseless

2008-02-16T21:03:00.000-08:00

It's high time to really and critically examine the common charges levied against the two Democratic presidential candidates. What I aim to show is that these common charges are baseless. First, let's start with Hillary.

Hillary Clinton:

1) She's too much of a policy-wonk
First of all, why is being a policy-wonk such a bad thing? Do we want someone like Bush, whose contempt for getting down the nuts and bolts of policy-making is well-known publicly? What is wrong with having a president that can talk shop with people who will actually make the laws that regulate people's lives?

2) She's not charismatic enough
This is an extension of the first criticism. People say that because Hillary is so caught up in the nuts and bolts of it all, she doesn't have the charisma to charm and coax lawmakers. But does charisma really help? Has it been proven empirically? Ultimately it is not charisma that matters; what matters if which party controls Congress. People keep forgetting that in reality, it is Congress that does the bulk of the policy-making work.

3) She's too crafty
People criticize Hillary for being too crafty, for acting too much like a politician. But isn't the president a politician also? Politics, whatever it might be, does include a technical element: the craft of statesmanship.

4) She has no core principles of her own:
People say that Hillary lives her life according to polls. Well, Bush, whatever else he is, is a man of his principles. I do not agree with his policies, but I believe that he really does mean what he says. So I ask: what is wrong with having a president that is willing to change his/her mind when new facts are known, or when a change of mind is necessary?

5) She's too divisive
People point to the contentious Clinton legacy in the '90s to argue that Hillary, by virtue of being a Clinton, is too divisive. But this is essentially akin to saying that somehow Hillary is to blame for what Bill did. To paraphrase the Bible, why should the sins of the husband be visited upon the wife?

Barack Obama:

1) He is all style, no substance:
People criticize Obama for being too rhetorical and not offering enough technical details of proposed policies. What do people want exactly? White papers? No, they don't want that at all. And it is really unrealistic to expect presidential candidates to come up with white papers, since no candidate is knowledgeable enough on all policy areas given the complexities of modern life. That is what a cabinet is for: technical advisers with expert knowledge that come up with the nuts and bolts.

2) He has no grasp of policy details:
Is it even possible for a candidate to grasp, down to the last detail, every possible issue in every policy area? People seem to forget that Obama used to be a law school professor, and trust me, you don't become a law school professor for being dumb. Presidents go through on the job training just like everyone else.

3) His supporters are annoying:
This criticism never made any sense to me. Who gives a shit what his supporters do? This is the kind of reasoning that says that as soon as someone or something becomes popular, it must be bad. Totally fallacious.

4) He is developing a cult of personality:
This is akin to saying that he is too charismatic. And what is wrong with being charismatic, provided that charisma is used to promote some good? This kind of criticism makes it seem like Obama is some kind of demagogue, but surely no sane person can say that with a straight face. He's not out inciting violence, or telling people to kill Jews, or stoking nationalist sentiments. So really, this criticism just doesn't hold.

So what does it come down to really? What it comes down to is that both candidates can make good presidents, and that there is really very little that separates them in reality. So why does the media, and each candidate's respective supporters, have to make a mountain of a mole hill? Hillary is not some cold-blooded, overly-ambitious political hack who's willing to do anything to get power, and neither Obama a pretty vase that is empty on the inside. They are both smart people who will in all likelihood do a much better job than Bush did.

My Grandfather: Some Thoughts on the Individual and History

2008-02-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

I heard Gregor gave a talk today about modern Chinese history since the creation of the PRC, and hearing him talk about the Sino-Japanese War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, I couldn't help but to think about my grandfather, who just turned 80 yesterday, because he lived through all of those tumultuous events.

Of course millions of Chinese people have experienced all these traumatic experiences, but my family is very self-conscious, and that's because all of my family were teachers and intellectuals. Among my family members, five have taught university-level courses, while 2 have taught high school. So pretty much nothing goes unreflected in my family, which explains why I am the way that I am.

I suppose a critical vein has always ran through my family. My grandfather's political problems first arose during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, when Mao Zedong asked the country's intellectuals to voice their opinions about the Communist leadership. My grandfather, who was teaching college at the time, wrote something to the effect that Mao is developing a cult of personality around him.

Things got even worse for my grandfather during the Cultural Revolutions. As is too often the case in state-sponsored purges, people turned on each other. In this case, one of my grandfather's colleagues denounced him as a counter-revolutionary, and as a result, my grandfather was essentially detained in a labor camp for five years doing hard labor and undergoing "re-education" and public "criticism."

You would think that my parents would have learned something from what happened to my grandfather, but then again, I am not surprised that they were just as politically critical, since this type of thing tends to run in the family. So as was the case, my mother joined the student protest movement in 1989, and saw some of her friends and students killed in Tiananmen Square.

And that, in a nutshell, is the brief causal history of how I got to America: Reagan granted those student protestors amnesty, and my mother took it and went to America. And here I am, almost 18 years after the fact. And I have taken from my family their naturally critical bent, so history might repeat itself yet, ha.

Of course I didn't realize what this all meant till much later, when I was 17 or 18, and I realized just how much I am shaped, conditioned, and influenced by historical circumstances beyond my control. That was when I began to seriously think about the relationship between the individual and history: how my family history is essentially a microcosm of all the tumultuous events of modern Chinese history, of how connected those two parallel histories have become, and most importantly, of their inseparability. That was when I finally gave up the notion that the individual can somehow remain completely outside of history: no one is outside of history, even if it's a history that you can no longer remember.

And that is what is fundamentally disturbing about the Chinese government's attempt to censor information in such a way as to manipulate a historical narrative that is not accurate. And the even more disturbing part is that this type of censoring needs not to be drastic--it only has to be subtle but to be insidious. When I hear that Chinese youth today have no historical memory of Tiananmen Square, that really disturbed me, because they are no longer conscious of how the government is using history to manipulate their consciousness. They are not conscious of the historical forces that continue to influence their daily lives.

This is what Orwell meant in 1984: without a historical memory, a people is doomed.

Chinese New Year?

2008-02-14T11:14:00.000-08:00

Whenever I see the commercial for the Chinese New Year's Parade in SF, which is billed as the "largest Chinese New Year's Parade on the west coast," I can't help but to think how artificial Chinese New Year has become in America.

Maybe I've just read one too many Asian American studies book, but I can't help but think how fake it is. Chinese New Year's in America, for what it's worth, is now just as "Chinese" as fortune cookies and orange chicken--which is to say, not Chinese at all. Like fortune cookies and orange chicken, Chinese New Year's Parade is made for white people.

Sorry, but I lived the first 11 years of my life in China, and that's not how I celebrated the lunar new year in China. Nobody held any parades. If you told me in '96 that CNY is celebrated with a giant parade in a geographic location specifically designated as "Chinatown," I would have laughed at you.

The REAL way to celebrate CNY in China is to make a shitload of dumplings on CNY Eve, watch the state-sponsored TV, and then staying up all night to set off firecrackers which are illegally procured.

Berkeley: What a Joke

2008-02-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

The entire business about the Berkeley City Council's resolution declaring the marine recruiters "unwelcome" intruders demonstrates just how low political discourse has sunk in modern American society. It has once again reaffirmed my view that Berkeley, for all its so-called political activism, is filled with people who are ideologues first and independent thinkers second, or third, or maybe not at all.

First of all, I see nothing wrong with the City Council granting Code Pink a spot in front of the recruitment center to protest. After all, citizens have the right to assemble, and the City Council is only upholding what is constitutionally allowed for every American.

But what I don't get is why they had to adopt the language that they did. First of all, the language makes a conceptual mistake by conflating protest against the war against the people who fight in it. These two things are conceptually distinct, and it is possible to be against the war but for the people who fight in it.

Second, in adopting the language that it did, the City Council is weighing the right of free expression unequally against the recruiters. After all, the recruiters are not coercing people into signing up for the marine corps, and neither are they doing anything illegal. The marine recruiters have just much of a right to try to recruit people as CodePink has a right to protest. Why does the City Council have to take a fucking side? Both organizations have equal right to express themselves under the law.

Third, as much as CodePink has an unequivocal right to protest, the content of their protest is illogical. Their claim is that their protest is a call to bring the troops home. Sure, that is a goal which I can agree with, but how is protesting against recruitment related to bringing the troops home? These are two separate issues. If CodePink really wants to bring the troops home, they should write their representatives and the president. I don't see how protesting against recruiting, which by the way is totally legal and non-coercive, can bring the troops home. Nobody is being forced to sign up: I get approached by these recruiters sometimes, and I just say no, and they leave me alone.

Thus, what should have been a relatively unproblematic case of each organization's exercising of their constitutional rights in a legal manner turned into a national brouhaha simply because the Berkeley City Council is not conceptually precise in their language.

Of course the backlash is just as reactionary and dogmatic. Of course all the old stereotypes about "Bersekeley" are raised again by the right. After all, how is holding federal funds for CA programs a just "retribution" for what the city of Berkeley did or said? Why should other programs not in Berkeley suffer because of a conceptual imprecision?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I present you the circus that has become our modern political dialogue: dogmatic, knee-jerk, reactionary fanatics on both sides demonizing each other, totally refusing to see any trace of legitimacy in the other's claims, and creating a public spectacle which will produce no tangible results at all in the long run.

This is how our political discourse has devolved: into pure theatre of the absurd.

How ironic that Berkeley is known for its free-speech movement in the 60s is now the very city that seeks to deny free speech to a perfectly legal governmental organization.

My how the times have changed.

And this is just not an isolated incident: this is the pattern for pretty much all kinds of political discourse on the Berkeley campus. All has to do is just look at how the "Peace Not Prejudice" week turned out to know.

This is why, over the last four years, I have become increasingly disenchanted by Berkeley's so-called "liberal activism." No, the activism of the 60s is gone; now it's replaced by absurdity and theatre. Berkeley's "activism" has become a corporate brand to sell to incoming students who still harbor a romantic, if misconceived, notion of what Berkeley is.

And like me, they will be suckered into it.

The Weekly 10 #1

2008-02-11T17:39:00.000-08:00

New feature: every week I'll upload 10 songs which, for one reason or another, have interested me in the past week. They don't necessarily have a thematic unity linking them, since they are just random selections.

I'm no musical snob, but I do like to share music with people. So if anything sounds interesting, get it before the Rapidshare link expire.

All songs are encoded in mp3 format @ 192k bitrate using LAME. I thought about doing lossless loads, but that would take up too much bandwidth, and most people don't have the equipment to tell the difference.

For the week of February 3rd, 2008: click here.

1) Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Cursed Sleep
This is from The Letting Go, the second album Will Oldham recorded under his current moniker. "Cursed Sleep" is the fourth track on the album. I like the instrumentation and the harmony that Dawn McCarthy sings.

2) Cat Power - New York
This is off Cat Power's new covers album, Jukebox. "New York" is the first track, and I enjoy Cat Power's ironic take on the song, turning it from a celebration of big city life into a song about resignation.

3) Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and Sonny Rollins - After Hours
Diz, Sonny Stitt, and Sonny Rollins basically just jam this one out in such a chill manner, just like the title indicates. Listen to this at 3 in the morning with a single malt scotch and you'll know exactly what I mean. This is from Sonny Side Up, which is probably one of the best pure jazz jam records in existence.

4) Eric Dolphy - Glad To Be Unhappy
This is Eric Dolphy covering Sinatra. Nothing really to say here other than that I like, a lot. From Outward Bound.

5) Jascha Heifetz - Sibelius Concerto in D minor for violin, First Movement: Allegro moderato
I think Heifetz really "owns" this Sibelius violin concerto, because out of all the performances I have of this concerto, Heifetz's performance is matched by none in terms of pure playing. This is from a collection of Heifetz performing violin concertos by Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Glazunov.

6) Oliver Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time, Fifth Movement: Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus
Translated, it means "praise to the eternity of Jesus." The quartet was written while Messiaen was in a German concentration camp during WW2.

7) Jonny Greenwood - Prospectors Arrive
From the There Will Be Blood soundtrack. I include this track as a companion piece to the Messiaen piece, since even a listener untrained in classical music, such as myself, can detect the similarities between the two pieces. This should come as no surprise since Jonny Greenwood has explicitly stated that one of his formative influences is Messiaen.

8) LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
From Sound of Silver. I just happen to like this song.

9) Nine Inch Nails - La Mer
From the Left side of The Fragile, which is becoming my favorite NIN album. I happen to think that Trent Reznor is a much better composer than he is a lyricist, since some of his lyrics border on the ridiculously juvenile/emo angst, which is kinda embarrassing for a guy who's approaching middle age. But there is no denying that Reznor is a first-rate composer, as this instrumental track shows.

10) Sam Cooke - You Gotta Move
From Night Beat, which is a stripped down soul record. I love Sam Cooke, always have, always will, and like the song says, sometimes you just gotta move on, from whatever it is that is troublesome.

Christian Rock Doesn't Make God Better...

2008-02-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

It just makes rock and roll worse.

So sayeth the wise man Hank Hill on King of the Hill in that episode when Bobby joins a youth evangelical group headed by a clergy that skates, has Jesus tattoos, and fronts a Christian punk rock band.

Even as a lapsed, non-practicing Catholic, I still find attempts to make religion "cool" to the kids stupid. It seriously degrades the artistic, literary, and mythical qualities of religion which one can appreciate without buying into the literal claims made by religion.

Now, I present you a manga version of the Bible.

Good God.

I don't understand the attempt to make the Bible "relevant" to the youths of today. Who gives a shit? If you are not serious about studying one of the most important documents in human history, then perhaps you shouldn't join the religion to begin with.

Regardless of whether you believe in Christian interpretations of the Bible, you cannot deny its literary, artistic, and cultural significance for the West. I don't care if people don't believe in the Bible, but to denigrate any significant works of art just pisses me off.

I mean, can you imagine Jesus asking God "why hast thou forsaken me?" in slang just to make it cool for the kids. What will that even look like? Is Jesus going to ask God, "Yo G, why you playing me like that?"

It's All About the Economy, Stupid!

2008-02-05T21:48:00.001-08:00

Time and again, James Carville proved himself to be onto something when he said that line: exit polls show that 9 out of 10 voters view the economy as the most pressing issue on Super Tuesday.

Which brings me to the next point: our political leaders don't know the first thing about economics.

Let us see what things have been done to "rejuvenate" the economy: Fed's cutting interest rates, proposed economic stimulus package consisting of giving tax rebates to families and cutting taxes for businesses, freezing mortgage rates to prevent foreclosure.

None of these proposals address the real problem of our economy: for years we Americans have lived beyond our means by borrowing against our assets (read: houses) to get easy credit, but nothing lasts forever, and now that the easy credit can no longer be sustained, the whole shit collapses.

Now I understand that a temporary freeze on mortgage rates is needed for the immediate short term, but none of the other proposals really do much to mitigate the fundamental structural problems of our economy.

First, giving tax rebates, no more than $600 per person, to families sounds good on paper and is an easy political sell, but let's examine what its effects really are. Very little. First, because the dollar is weak, so consumers pay more for imports, which we do a lot, especially on crucial commodities like energy. Although the weakening of the dollar might shift the balance of trade in a positive direction, but it's not enough.

Second, because Americans can no longer live beyond their means through easy credit, consumers are now becoming more spendthrift, as they should be in this case. However, this means that their marginal propensity to consumer (MPC) goes down while their marginal propensity to save (MPS) goes up. Meaning: the tax rebate will not have the desired effect of pumping a large majority of the tax rebates back into the economy.

Third, tax cuts for businesses sound like a good idea on paper, and it sure pleases the constituents in an election year. However, if consumers spending goes down, demand goes down. When demand goes down, production goes down. When production goes down, jobs are cut. So what exactly are businesses supposed to use the tax cut for? Investing in new equipment? They won't do that if demand for their products decrease, and they will not keep jobs either. In essence, much of the tax cuts down to the businesses themselves, not the workers.

Fourth, cutting interest rates have less than the desired effect, because again, businesses will not really invest because of decreasing consumer demands. Decreasing consumer demand is key because ours is an economy that largely functions because of consumer spending. And for the last decade or so, consumers have spent beyond their means, and now that they no longer can, demand decreases, a lot.

So in reality, the political actions so far do not really address the fundamental problem of our economy.

And no one is talking about investing in our crumbling public infrastructure, which is always a smart investment in the long run, and in the short run, it creates new jobs. We are not talking about Depression era WPA here, but more things like fixing roads, bridges, and our collapsing tunnels. God knows our infrastructure is in a dire state: witness the Big Dig collapse and the Minnesota Bridge collapse.

Yet no one is really talking about this pretty sure-fire way of rejuvenating the economy. Instead, all we have, yet again, is another tax cut. Sure, it's an easy sell, but it doesn't do shit.

A Hegelian Interpretation of Superbowl XLII

2008-02-03T23:46:00.000-08:00

The story: an underdog team led by an unproven quarterback plays stifling defense on the odds-on favorite team with a dominant offense, ends up winning by 3 points on a last second play, creating one of the biggest upsets in Superbowl history.

If you think I'm describing today's game in which the Giants upset the Patriots, you are wrong. Because I'm really talking about Superbowl XXXVI, in which Tom Brady, then an unproven commodity, led the New England Patriots, a 14 point underdog, to victory by defeating the St. Louis Rams.

But before I go on, let me just say: it's about to get HISTORICAL up in there.

The similarities are uncanny. The Rams came into the Superbowl as the most dominant offensive team in the league, being first in total scoring and yardage, having racked up over 500 points during the regular season. They had offensive weapons in every position: Kurt Warner was named league MVP, they had Issac Bruce and Torry holt as receivers, Marshall Faulk in the running game and was named the league offensive player of the year. Their offense was called "The Greatest Show on Turf." The Rams' defense ranked 3rd in the league.

Sound familiar? That's because the 2001 Rams were remarkably like the 2007 Patriots: a team that dominated both offensively and defensively, had weapons at every position in the offense, led by a league MVP at quarterback, and considered the odds-on favorite to win against the underdog.

I couldn't help but remember, after watching today's game, the similar historical forces at work. It is positively Hegelian. It is as if the Geist of professional football decided that it's time to get dialetical and to bring about an event of historical significance: the nearly perfectly symmetrical rise and fall of the New England Patriots. To top it all off, the "Spygate" incident that marked the beginning of the Patriot's 2007 season also came to haunt them at the end of their season, an allegation that said the Patriots also videotaped the Rams in 2001.

Coincidence? So says everyone. But I suspect that there is some deeper, world-historical force at work here: the Spirit of Professional Football seeking its own self-actualization and self-awareness, using the Patriots as its instruments. Just as Geist used Tom Brady in 2001 as its instrument, so did Geist use Eli Manning as its instrument in completing this historical occurrence.

What does this mean? It means that World-History has passed the New England Patriots: they will no longer be dominant, for their role in world-history has been passed onto someone else. They were instruments of world-history for a while, but Geist is always moving.

(and yes, this is all a joke, don't take it seriously, I'm sure Hegel is rolling in his grave right now)

Tyranny from Left and Right

2008-02-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

I am disenchanted with both the Left and Right political and cultural movements in our country. I often find myself in contempt of both liberals and conservatives, because they are both extremely ideological, to the point that they become tyrannical, authoritarian, and even repressive.

Yes, this applies to the modern Left too, with its emphasis on free speech, toleration, multi-culturalism, free-thinking, diversity, and whatever buzz words that happen to be the flavor of the month or week. In some ways, the Left is just as repressive as the Right, and both are plagued by cases of extremism.

Take, for example, the issue of the welfare state. Your typical Conservative will tout the virtues of the free market, cutting taxes and government budget, individualism, hard work, and responsibility. Your typical Lefty will argue that the typical Conservative is inhumane, that the state must play a role in helping those in need, that the destitute and the homeless are not to blame because they are victims of unjust social/political/economic institutional arrangements.

But consider this: the reality is far more complicated than this either-or duality. Capitalism does indeed have some significant virtues, such as generating efficiency, economic growth that increase the standard of living, and distributing goods/services according to preference. But of course government can play a role and often should, to ensure some equity, to prevent abuse of the system, etc.

Take, for example religion. The Axis of Atheism (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) will argue, in a shrill tone, that God does not exist, that anyone who believes in God must be an unreasonable, intolerant, blood fanatic intent on teaching Creationism in public schools and starting up jihads to blow modernity all the way back to the Stone Age. Then of course you have your evangelicals who argue that the Axis of Atheism are all going to Hell, that homosexuals are sinners, that God hates feminists.

But consider this: religion has been forces of progress and change, that religion has inspired great art, charity, humane acts, and compassion, that some religious thinkers are some of our best thinkers. Similarly, not all atheists, homosexuals, or feminists are out to destroy America, family values, and bring about the Apocalypse and the Anti-Christ. Perhaps, and here one might even gasp, they actually get along with religious people.

Take, for example, free speech. Both sides are filled with hypocrites of the very first order. Fox News has no problem with Bill O'Reilly blatantly abuse his guests, but it has a problem with critics of the war. The Left has no problem with the president of Iran speaking in Columbia but has a problem when it's the leader of the KKK.

But consider this: if free speech is to mean anything, it means that you cannot simply give free speech to simply those who agree with your own views. That if free speech is to mean anything, it means that Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and the Grand Dragon of the KKK have an equal right to speak in a legally approved manner.

Take, for example, the issue of global warming. Your typical Lefty will argue that global warming is real, that it is man-made, that anyone who even remotely raises some legitimate doubt must be crazy or a nutcase. But also take your typical Conservative, who argue that global warming is a hoax, that it is unfair to tax oil companies' profits.

But consider this: why is no discussion contrary to one's own opinion allowed? Why isn't it legitimate to raise questions about global warming?

Take, for example, America's foreign policy relationship with Israel. I am of course thinking about the shit storm that exploded over Waltz and Mearsheimer's book. I have read the book, and to be honest, I really don't understand the whole controversy. It is very academic in content and in tone as far as I can tell. But the orthodoxy says that any skepticism about Israel must be a sign of Holocaust-deniers, anti-semitism, and advocacy to wipe Israel off the map.

My point is this: both the Left and Right engages in acts of hypocrisy so blatant, so glaring in their numbers and scope that I can't help but be disgusted by them. They both shamelessly and ruthlessly engage in the demonization of the other, creating exaggerated claims to reduce the Other to caricature. Both are more interested in ridiculing each other than to actually debate and reason. What constitutes their "discourse" is nothing than shrieks at and past each other, a refusal to consider all the facts, a shrill dialogue that makes Harpies sound euphonic.

In other words, both the Left and Right are not interested in finding out the truth. After all, they have already reached their own conclusions, and what is a little thing called truth gonna do about it. Both the Left and Right reach their conclusions first and then rationalize them post hoc.

But the reality is, on any given issue that is relevant and pertinent, the truth is far more complicated and nuanced than what either the Left or Right will like you to believe. In fact, any reasonable person who has REALLY explored these debates would realize that there is no single answer, that sometimes both sides can make arguments with merit, that sometimes it might even be possible to reach a consensus based on facts.

This is why I cannot stand our modern Left and Right, because they are both full of shit.

What did Hillary Say?

2008-02-01T20:39:00.000-08:00

The last Democratic debate was a welcome change of tone after all the mud-slinging that characterized the South Carolina debate. In contract to this debate, both Hillary and Obama acted really courteously toward each other. In fact, Obama even did the gentlemanly thing by pulling out Hillary's chair when the debate ended.

After that chivalric act, they leaned into each other and exchanged some words that are not heard. And since I just watched Top Gun on cable tv last night at 3 in the morning, I think this is what Hillary probably said to Obama:

The Travails of Being a Lakers Fan

2008-02-01T15:36:00.000-08:00

My head just about exploded when I heard the news: the Lakers traded for Paul Gasol, one of the premier big men of this generation in the league, and all they had to give away are Kwame Brown, one of the biggest busts in NBA history, Jarvaris Crittenton, a third-string point guard, and two draft picks.

It blows my mind how much the Lakers gained in return than what they gave away. I mean this is fucking Paul Gasol we are talking about here! HOLY SHIT! Oh man I cannot contain my excitement, because this is the starting five when Andrew Bynum comes back:

1 - Derek Fisher
2 - Kobe Bryan
3 - Lamar Odom
4 - Paul Gasol
5- Andrew Bynum.

I mean, HOLY FUCKING MOTHER OF GOD! Look at that line-up: three of those guys command automatic double teams: Kobe, Gasol, and Bynum. Can you imagine either Bynum or Gasol down in the post, drawing two defenders, passing kicking out the ball to Fish for a 3, or to Lamar/Kobe for penetration, or simply passing it to the other big on the weak side for an easy lay-up/dunk because of single-coverage.

Oh my god I can't even imagine how fucking crazy that offense will be: it will be virtually unguardable, because at least two of them will command double teams, or if they are single-covered, they will absolutely dominate the defender. And combine that with the fluid ball movement of the triangle offense--this is fucking unstoppable.

And this is not even to mention what they can do on defense: Kobe, Fish, Gasol, and Bynum are all good defenders. Bynum and Gasol will get so many offensive boards that they will have crazy second-chance points. They are both long and athletic and will create so many shot-blocking opportunities. Not to mention Kobe and Fish's individual, lock-down defense they can play on the opposing team's guards.

For the first time since 2003, I can unequivocally say that the Lakers have as good of a chance of winning the championship as the best teams in the NBA, up there with Detroit, Boston, Dallas, and San Antonio. They can easily beat Phoenix with this line up, since there's no way Phoenix can defend on the interior. I am just super PUMPED!

It has been a long time coming though after the 2003-2004 season ended. That's when it all started down hill. Shaq and Phil left, Kobe couldn't lead the team to more than 30 wins. They couldn't get past Phoenix in the last two seasons in the first round of the playoffs. They traded Caron Butler for Kwame Brown, only to watch Caron Butlet become of the premier wing players in the NBA. They were plagued with injuries of their key players in the last two seasons just as their game was picking up.

So all in all, the years 2004 to 2007 has not been good to the loyal Lakers fans. I had to watch the most dominant team of the late 90's/early 00's become a pale shadow of its former self, torn apart by ego battles, injuries, incompetent management, and just bad luck. And now, wow, now within one day, the entire season is turned around. This must be how a Celtics felt when KG signed with Boston.

It is nothing less than a miracle: suddenly there is hope again. Suddenly the travails of the last four years seem a distant memory best left forgotten.

Hope springs eternal.

America's Hate-Love Relationship with Pork

2008-01-28T12:10:00.000-08:00

Pork, everyone hates it, but no one can live without it.

But I am not talking about the meat; I'm talking about Congressional pet projects. And what can be said about pork the food can also be said about pork spending: everyone wants less because they know it's bad, except they can't quite give it up when it's their turn.

In tonight's State of the Union, President Bush will make an emphasis on stopping earmarks, money set aside by members of Congress for projects designed to funnel money, jobs, and favor into their own districts.

Look, I'm for cutting back on pork as the next guy, but let's be honest here: pork-barrel legislation is the grease that helps the American political engine run. Because when push comes to shove, when election time rolls around every 2, 4, and 6 years, the only thing that an incumbent can use to appeal to his local constituents is pork. He can say that he got x amount of money and jobs in his district, and of course, his local constituents will applaud him for it.

The heart of the matter is this: everyone, politicians and constituents, play this little game called "let's bash pork-barrel" spending, but no one is really willing to give up pork. The same people who decry the Bridge to Nowhere will not decry when their own district representative brings federal money in the form of a construction contract that generates jobs for the locals. The same people who decry other Congress members' pork-barrel spending will not elect their own representative if he fails to bring in an equal amount of federal money.

Because at the bottom of it, American politics is really about representation of local interests, and the pork is the easiest and most obvious way for politicians to show their constituents that he is representing their interests. Whether you think this way of conducting politics is normatively correct is another matter. But to me, it doesn't look like people really want something different. Sure, every once in a while, we all play the game and denounce some easy target like the Bridge to Nowhere, but everyone--politicians and citizens both--are complicit in this little game we play.

And in this little game, everyone benefits. Congress members get a chance to denounce an easy target and sound the righteous rhetoric horn, appearing to be above the squalor, all the while negotiating deals with other Congress members that will funnel money into all of their districts. Voters, on the other hand, are assuaged that their representatives are "clean," all the while enjoying the very money funneled through a process that they supposedly "hate."

Of course I'm not saying that pork spending should be limitless, but all this incessant, self-righteous rhetoric about "stopping waste" strikes me as dubious, self-serving, and worst of all, hypocritical. More so, it is utterly unrealistic, because the structure of American politics present an irresistible incentive to create pork spending. Unless Americans are willing to change the structure, they can never realistically expect pork spending to stop.

Caption: Here, one can see a local constituent enjoying the federal money funneled into his district by his Congressional representative

On the Need to Identify with Fictional Characters

2008-01-28T01:23:00.000-08:00

My two favorite movies from 2007 are No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. What they have in common among other things, and it is this commonality that makes me attracted to both of them, is their protagonists: Daniel Plainview in TWBB, and Anton Chigurh in NCFOM.

In my discussions with other people about these two movies, one complaint has emerged on a fairly consistent basis, namely, that neither movie really "explains" these characters, thereby making them almost impossible to identify with. A related complaint is that because these characters are impossible to identify with and are not historicized, they do not "grow."

I fail to see the merits of these criticisms, because the need to "identify" with a character through some kind of psychological historicization of the character seems to me a reflection of the prejudice, unsophisticated in my opinion, to feel at one with the characters. I see no reason why identifiability should be an artistic requirement.

First, these two movies are not naturalistic or realistic; they are rather mythical. They both take place in a geographical settings that are rich with allegory and symbolism, and they both feature stories that have overt Bibilical/religious undertones. Therefore, to expect these movies to be populated by realistic, everyday people is futile at best. Rather, these movies are populated by larger-than-life, mythical, otherworldly characters.

Second, why the demand to identify with these characters? What is the point of identifying with an extreme misanthrope or an utterly pathological psycho-killer? Some characters are meant to provoke and shock, not to identify with. If they are to provoke and shock at all, they must in some sense remain mysterious to the viewers.

Third, why the need to, so to speak, "psychologize" these characters, in other words, to explain and rationalize the process by which they become who they are. There are many pitfalls in taking such a psychological approach. First, it is likely that any psychological explanation that is offered will be too reductive. After all, do we need another "he was abused as a child by his father" type of explanation? These kind of psychological explanations are too simplistic or causally trivial. Second, the need to psychologize and rationalize evil reflects a bias to moralize everything. Why is it not acceptable to accept that sometimes evil people just exist, that they are just evil.

Fourth, why do these characters need to "grow"? What are they supposed to be growing into? Are they supposed to undergo some kind of moral transformation that makes them bearable? Again, this is just a bias to moralize fictional characters. If they are presented as fully formed in the beginning, what exactly is wrong with that? But of course, these characters are not presented explicitly in the beginning. The viewers begin to understand more of these characters as the films progress, but that is not the same thing as these characters' growing, because the characters themselves are already fully-formed--it is only the audience that needs to peel back the layers so to speak. But even then, both movies never fully reveal these characters, which is good, because the mysterious and inexplicable nature of these characters contributes to the overall effect.

And these arguments that I have made go for pretty much all works of art. Why is it that people feel the need to identify with characters? It matters not to me whether a character is "likable," because that is not the point: the point is to create an artistic effect. I just see the need to identify as reflecting a kind of self-absorption, the inability or willful denial to confront reality, which is to say, the denial that in real life, as is in art, there are people whom we can never know or understand, and that sometimes they commit acts of evil which cannot simply be rationalized away.

The Last Straw

2008-01-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

This is the last straw for me: I can no longer, in good conscience, vote for Hillary Clinton in the election.

I can't believe how blatantly, and worse, more smugly, Bill Clinton played the race card in the video above. By comparing Obama's victory today in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's victories in that same state in 1984 and 1988, Bill Clinton has essentially pigeonholed Obama as the "black" candidate--someone who gets support from African American voters but lose the general vote.

Nevermind the fact that exit polls show that Obama has a quarter of the white vote, and nevermind that despite Hillary's attempt to frame this contest as a decision between the first "female" president and the first "black" president, 79% of female African American voters chose Obama.

The facts are not that important in the end; what is important is Bill Clinton's absolutely SLEAZY way of playing the race card. The Clinton campaign has been hinting at this for the whole week, but now they made it explicit.

This is exactly the kind of politics that Obama says he will transcend and leave behind, and I am sick and tired of Clinton's sleaze tactics. What a way to fuck up a genuinely historical moment in America, when not one, but TWO, viable candidates can become president and overcome the racial and gender barrier. Instead of focusing on this opportunity, Clinton plays the race card.

I cannot stand this brand of politics, and I will not vote for Hillary in the primaries.

The Only Victim is the Truth

2008-01-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

Another maxim: in a time of elections, the only victim is the truth.

Case in point: the Clinton campaign's portrayal of Obama as a Reagan lover, thereby trying to discredit him in the eyes of Democratic primary voters.

The truth: Bill Clinton, more than any other Democratic politician in recent history, steered the Democrat party toward the right by using Reagan-esque rhetoric and adopting Reagan-esque policy positions, albeit to a lesser degree than Reagan's own policies. He does this because Reagan created a hugely successful and powerful political coalition which is only now beginning to fracture.

Clinton adopted Reagan's fiscal conservatism and anti-welfarist stances by dismantling AFDC. In otherwise, he dismantled the welfare state as we knew it. In this he was no different than Reagan or Thatcher, two political leaders, who in the 1980s, created a sustained campaign against the traditional liberal welfare state. Granted, Clinton's rhetoric is not as to the right as Reagan or Thatcher, but his policies implicitly acknowledged the success of the Reagan program and imitated it and packaged it for a generation of Democratic politicians in a safe, presentable, and more importantly, something they can sell.

Clinton also adopted Reagan's tough-on-crime policy, because this kind of crime politics has been proven successful. The most obvious example of this is the continuation of the War on Drugs. In fact Clinton elevated the Drug Czar into a Cabinet-level position.

What about in foreign policy? Clinton was not as explicitly militaristic as Reagan; indeed he even cut military spending and shut down military bases. On the surface, this is as anti-Reagan as it gets. But look deeper and one will see that Clinton is not a dovish president. Aside from the withdrawal of troops from Somalia at the beginning of his first term, Clinton had a fairly interventionist foreign policy: under Clinton, the US military intervened in the Balkans conflict, East Timor, Haiti, and air bombing of Iraq.

Of course Clinton did not explicitly acknowledge that he was following Reagan's lead. Instead he called it "The Third Way", which is another way of packaging Reagan-esque policies in a tamer way so as to sell it to a centrist, moderate constituency. A similar movement occurred in Britain with the election of Tony Blair, who called his policy positions "New Labor."

So it is extremely hypocritical for both Hillary and Bill Clinton to try to paint Obama as some kind of Reagan-lover who is not intent to bring a new politics as he promised in his campaign. How the fuck can the Clintons even make this claim when Bill Clinton built his political success precisely based on following Reagan's policies?

In fact, the modern Democratic party is the product of attempts to imitate Reagan's political success in building a powerful coalition by following his policies and packaging it in a more moderate, more presentable way to centrist voters.

So is it so unreasonable for Obama to suggest that Reagan had some good ideas? Of course not! I am not going to make any normative judgments about Reagan's policies (but believe me, I could), but what is undeniable is that Reagan was a tremendous politician who successfully built a political coalition that has endured for 20 years, produced Republican dominance in both Congress and the Presidency. Of course any politician and party would kill to have that kind of success, which is exactly what Bill Clinton did--he followed Reagan, which is itself not unreasonable--after all, why not imitate something that has proven to be successful?

What is unreasonable is this sudden about-face, this attempt to portray Obama as a Reagan-lover and discredit him in the eyes of Democratic primary voters, because that is just pure hypocrisy.

The maxim repeated: in a time of elections, the only victim is the truth.

Sound The Alarm! It's Election Time!

2008-01-23T00:39:00.000-08:00

If there is one thing you can be sure of, it is this: when it's election season, all the politicians will sound their alarmist horns.

Case in point: the economy.

Suddenly all the big shots are calling for a stimulus package, especially Bush, who has had a change of mind and decided that we are really facing an upcoming recession. To use his own phrase, the economic outlook is becoming "increasingly mixed." What the fuck does that even mean?

Anyways, all the Pols are sounding off on the fact that foreign investors and countries are buying up shares of our finance firms like Merill-Lynch and Citigroup. And you can bet your money that the Pols are saying that we can't surrender our money markets to "foreigners."

Never mind the fact that capital markets are global, or the fact that China has been financing your average American citizen's consumption and debt-ridden lifestyle for the last decade or so, the fact is that we need foreign investments to bail out our own financial corporations. Furthermore, we can only hope that the weakening dollars will increase our export revenues and hopefully shift the balance of payment positively, if only for a little bit.

But lest one forgets, a weakening dollar means all of our imported commodities become less affordable, and the most important import commodity that every single American, no matter how rich or how poor, will always need: OIL.

So all this talk about giving everyone a tax rebate ignores two considerable facts. First, the rebate (which looks like it will realistically be about $500 to $600 per household) will not make a huge difference considering the weak dollar. Second, the tax cut does not cover people who don't make enough to pay income tax, but precisely because they make so little, they are more likely to spend whatever tax rebate they do receive, thus more likely to pump that money back into the economy.

This is why I get exasperated when I watch presidential debates, because nobody has the balls to say anything based on actual economic analysis. Instead, we get vague answers like tax rebates, "green-collar" jobs, and stopping free trade.

In the words of Arrested Development, Come On!

The Savages

2008-01-16T01:26:00.001-08:00

I really liked The Savages, a movie written and directed by Tamara Jenkins. It's one of the better movies I have seen in recent memory, and it would have been almost perfect had not the last 10 minutes of the movie shifted the tone of the movie so much. But more on that later.

The first thing that struck me about the movie is just how natural it seems, almost like a lived-in kind of feeling. It captures ordinary people and their lives very well, with equal amounts of humor, misery, and absurdity. When I first saw the trailer, I was afraid that Jenkins would make yet another absurdist black comedy movie about dysfunctional families.

Sure, the movie does make you laugh at uncomfortable places at things you are not supposed to, but it also realistically portray the lives of its characters, all of whom are minor and do not stand for some symbol or archetype. This is a movie about real people with real problems, most of them minor but consequential to the people involved, and it probes familial dysfunction in depth.

None of the characters are stock characters; instead, each has his/her own personality, mannerisms, and tics. And these characters are well portrayed by the actors involved. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who seems incapable these days of turning in a bad acting job) are two of my favorite, semi-underrated character actors, and each does a great job of playing siblings who love, hate, annoy, and console each other. They have great chemistry on screen.

But what took me by surprise is Philip Bosco, who plays the patriarch of the titular family, Lenny Savage. The character is an abusive father who neglected his children for so long but is losing his mind to dementia. This is not supposed to be a sympathetic character, but Bosco nevertheless plays him in a way that gets the audience to care. He doesn't try to win the audience's sympathy, but neither does he ham up the abusive father stock type either. He does a good job balancing both the humane part of Lenny and his more abusive inside, infusing his character with the irritability, the misery, realization, and the regret of someone who's about to die and realizes that he has been bad to his children but can't quite say it.

In essence, The Savages is a small movie, but I don't mean that in any pejorative sense. It is only small in that it's a movie about small people dealing with the fact that old people die in loneliness in some forgotten nursing home. It deals with the fact that most children of dysfunctional families are in some way always affected by their childhood. That the movie does this without being so obvious is a great achievement, and it is one of the major reasons why I enjoy it so much. The movie doesn't make any grand revelations about mortality, or sibling dynamics, or family--that is not its aim. Rather, it just portrays, in a realistic and understated way, how a family interacts and all the equal measures of humor, anger, humiliation, love, and sadness that all family life consists of.

This is not a movie to watch if you are looking for uplift, because you will get none. There is no epiphany, no life-changing lessons at the end: just regular people with ordinary, mediocre lives trying to get by.

That is, until the last 10 minutes. Had the movie ended right after Lenny's death, it would have been nearly perfect, which, coming from me, is high praise, since I never say any movie is perfect out of principle. It was apparent from the beginning that only after Lenny has died can his children move on with their lives again. There is nothing wrong with this message, but what is wrong with how the last 10 minutes dealt with this claim is the tone: it becomes too triumphant.

Instead of taking the understated, realistic, and natural tone of what came before, the last 10 minutes turn into something like an epiphany or neatly-wrapped resolution that the movie has been wise to avoid. The sudden transformation of the siblings is just inconsistent with the rest of the movie because it's too obvious, not subtle at all. Instead of acknowledging life's complexities, the ending seems to pat the audience on the back and tells them that these characters' lives turn out to be happy after all.

Of course, even this "happy" resolution is not as blatantly optimistically sappy as most Hollywood movies, but it's enough of a change in tone that it feels jarring. I really don't understand why Jenkins chose to go with this tone for the ending. It's if at the end, she decided that maybe the audience just needs a little bit of uplift. But if this is the case, why subject the audience to the previous 90 minutes with a much different tone? Anyways, I just felt like the ending was a cop out. While it did not significantly compromise the integrity of the rest of the movie, it nonetheless deviates from it.

In reality, however, this is just my nit-picking, but nit-picking is what I am trained to do with my "useless" humanities education.

What Is Wrong With Being Sad?

2008-01-15T23:02:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great article up today on the value of melancholy and tragedy, which today are considered "negative" and treated as a disease. I saw this on Arts & Letters Daily, which I cannot recommend people to read enough.

The gist of the article is that Americans today are obsessed with eradicating all signs of melancholy, or all feelings of dissatisfaction. I cannot emphasize enough, as the author does, that there is indeed actual cases of clinical depression and that they should be treated professionally and medically. However, I do agree with the article that Americans have an unwarranted prejudice against people who don't seem "upbeat" all the time. Also, I agree with the distinction that the author makes between melancholia and clinical depression. According to the author, the difference is one of degree.

"Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are — persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing."

I wouldn't go so far as to characterize it as sadness, since I do not feel "down" whenever I am confronted with how the world actually is. But I do, as the author states, feel that the world we live in is not quite right, that there are indeed things below, above, and aside from the surface.

Having just read The Birth of Tragedy, I feel that the author makes a somewhat Nietzschean claim--that beauty cannot exist without tragedy, that the attempt to eliminate all feelings of dissatisfaction and pessimism will eliminate beauty altogether.

This explains in part why I have trouble hiding my disdain towards people who are "sunny," "happy-go-lucky," and "upbeat" all the fucking time. Life is far more than happiness, and I might even go as far to say that the purpose of life isn't to be happy--in fact, there is no purpose, other than living itself.

Idle-Talk and "Experience" vs. "Change"

2008-01-15T16:28:00.000-08:00

In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses a phenomenon called idle-talk, a mode of discourse that is characteristic of the average everyday Being of Dasein. Idle-talk, as an ontical phenomenon, disseminates information to Dasein so it doesn't have to interpret the phenomenon for himself.

How does this relate to our current presidential election? All one has to do is look at the whole "experience-vs-change" dualism that has been constructed by both the candidates and the punditry. In this neatly constructed narrative, Hillary is the candidate of "experience" while Obama is the candidate for "change." Indeed this narrative has been accepted as "true" such that polls indicate that voters have now bought into the dualism.

The salient feature of idle-talk, according to Heidegger, is its ability to "reveal" the truth to those engaged in and encompassed by idle talk such that the content of idle-talk become "the truth", regardless of whether the content is actually true or not.

And anyone who actually does a little research should know that this narrative of experience-vs-change is patently false and has no purchase on reality. In this column by Timothy Noah on Slate, he examines the Hillary camp's claims to experience and shows that, all things considered, she is no more experienced than Obama is. In fact, all three major Democratic candidates have about equal levels of experience.

So yet again idle-talk distorts the truth, and maybe not even intentionally or maliciously. But the ultimate danger is that voters who have bought into this false dilemma of experience-or-change will not make good decisions in the voting booth.

Epistemology and Presidential Elections

2008-01-14T17:55:00.000-08:00

It's always interesting to hear what presidential candidates claim to KNOW, because these kind of claims are always epistemological in nature. In most cases, presidential candidates are not justified to make the kind of epistemic claims they do, at all.

Take, for instance, the recent back-and-forth between and among Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on whether the troop surge has "worked" or not. Republican candidates accuse the Democrats of refusing to acknowledge President Bush and Gen. Petraeus' wisdom in implementing the troop surge, all the while accusing the more dove-ish candidates in its own party of lacking faith. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates claim that the surge is not working.

But put in broader perspective, what these candidates claim to KNOW cannot be justified. The troop surge has barely been in effect for a year, hardly enough time to know its long-term consequences, not only in Iraq, but in the Middle Eastern region as a whole. After all, Middle Eastern politics is still being shaped by decisions made by the British and the French after the end of the World War I some eighty years ago.

At this point, not even experts can accurately predict what will happen in Iraq and the Middle East, let alone presidential candidates, most of whom have little to no real foreign policy experience (I'm looking at you Rudy, Obama, Hillary, Edwards, Romney, Huckabee, Ron Paul), to declare authoritatively on whether the surge is "working" or what its long-terms effects will be on Iraq and the region.

In other words, no one in the current field of presidential candidates is really qualified to make the kind of broad, generalized claims about what they KNOW regarding the troop surge and its effects.

What Is The Value of the Humanities

2008-01-14T00:39:00.000-08:00

Stanley Fish, in his blog for the New York Times, has written a two-part column on the value of the humanities: Part One and Part Two. Fish's thesis, at least I take it, and I could be misreading him, is that the humanities cannot be adequately justified in any utilitarian or instrumental manner.

But first, some clarifications. By humanities Fish means the education of humanities as an academic, professionalized niche, not the actual production of humanistic works like plays, novels, and so forth. Therefore, the question is not "what is the value of plays, novels, and poetry," but "what is the value of learning about plays, novels, and poetry?"

What does Fish mean by the claim that the humanities, as he uses the term, cannot be justified instrumentally? I take it that he means that the humanities are, by its nature, not designed to produce instrumental value. Whatever instrumental value the studies of humanities may have, Fish argues, is either causally indirect as to be trivial or contingent and thus not exclusive to the humanities alone.

Fish then goes on to examine the various arguments made to justify the studies of humanities in utilitarian/instrumental terms, and he knocks them down one by one. The conclusion, at least the way I read Fish, is that any attempts to justify the humanities in utilitarian terms is inherently going to be weak, and this kind of defense of the humanities misses the real point of the humanities--that the studying of humanities is its own end.

However, I find Fish's argument, though thought-provoking, to be ultimately dissatisfying. To me, it seems Fish is simply giving up all hope of finding some kind of external justification for the humanities. It might be a simple and elegant solution, but it leaves the nagging feeling that the humanities are worthless.

Personally, I find this conclusion somewhat distressing, since a large part of my own person and daily activities are connected with the humanities. And maybe this just reflects a deep-seated need to justify my own actions, but I will attempt to make an argument that claims that the humanities does have some worth relative to some value that is external to the studies of humanities itself.

However, I must preface this argument by saying that I agree, for the most part, with Fish's assessment that the usual arguments for humanities brush over the facts that what one learns by studying the humanities, one can also learn in a non-academic, non-professionalized manner. It is not true, a priori, that one cannot become an informed citizen, a critical thinker, or a sophisticated person without having to study the humanities in a formal, academic setting.

Therefore, the argument that I have to come up with has to be contingent, but this does not make the argument implausible.

The argument is this: the studying of humanities, in its current form, has a value insofar as it helps us clarify our thinking on issues which concern us on a daily basis. And even though the studies of the humanities is not by itself necessary to achieve this clarity of thinking, it is valuable insofar as our current social, political, and economic arrangements are not conducive to creating opportunities for thinking clearly and coherently. Therefore, the value of the humanities lies in its institutional nature: the humanities provide the institutions--namely the academia and its products--that allow for the pursuit of clear thinking on difficult issues that other social institutions do not provide, or at least not as much. All of this will be spelled out in somewhat greater detail, although a complete analysis can't be achieved here due to space constraints.

First, I assume that people are confronted with various issues which present difficulties. For example, what are our responsibilities toward the less well-off, should women have the right to abortion, what are our responsibilities toward environmental sustainability, should prisoners of war have the same rights under the Constitution, and so forth. And this is not to mention the various ethical choices that people have to make on a daily basis. Of course, one might reply that for most people, these aren't even issues since they never present themselves as such. But I contend that even if most people are not aware that these are issues, they nonetheless affect them. For the sake of argument, I will assume that people are not least somewhat aware of these problems which have no immediate or obvious solution and which reasonable people can have legitimate disagreements about.

Second, I assume that when confronted with these difficult issues, even at a somewhat opaque level, people have a desire to know what to do when presented with these difficulties. I also assume that these difficulties are difficult because they have no obvious solutions and thus present a plethora of conflicting, but seemingly plausible, choices. I further assume that in this kind of situation, people would want something to help them decide among the seemingly plausible alternatives.

Third, and herein lies the value of the humanities: the studying of humanities is that something, the source from which people can look to to decide between these alternatives. However, I cannot stress this point enough--the studying of humanities does not present a solution by itself--any solution has to come from the individual in question. The value of the humanities is that it provides the individual in question with a plethora of ideas of people who have struggled with the same difficulties before him. For example, if one were concerned about whether the government is rightfully restricting his freedom of expression, he can, from studying the humanities, gain plenty of perspectives, from Plato, John Stuart Mill, and various rulings of the Supreme Court. Again, simply studying these materials won't yield a solution, but it does provide the individual with some alternatives that he can choose between. He can peruse each alternative, examine its soundness, react against it, and finally, come to his own conclusions, whether it's agreement with one alternative, disagreement with another, or some mixture of both.

Fourth, it might not be enough to simply read the source materials, because some, if not most of the materials are difficult to read, or they are confusing. Thus, there is a need for secondary sources, most of which are written by professional academics who are specialized. Thus, the academia itself has some value.

Fifth, given enough time to digest and think, hopefully the individual can now confront these difficult choices with a greater clarity of thinking, more confidence in his own choices, and a more solid foundation upon which to make choices in the future. I assume that such things, as I have described them, have some value to most people.

However, I can already anticipate two objections to this argument of mine. First, one can object that the assumption that people value clarity of thinking in making decisions is not a value at all. After all, there are many people who are not self-aware, who are not reflective in making decisions, but who are very successful. Second, one can object that the value that I have spelled out is not exclusive to the study of the humanities--one can achieve this value without the humanities.

My response to the first objection is one of concession. My assumption that greater clarity of thinking is valuable is not self-evident. I assume that even if one were already successful in life, greater clarity of thinking is only adding value to that success, not detracting from it. But this is a highly contentious point, and because I have no empirical proof of this claim, I have to admit that this is purely conjecture at this point.

My response to the second objection is the following: yes, it is true that one can gain greater clarity of thinking without having to study the humanities in an academic or professionalized context. There are people who are greater thinkers who read humanistic works on their own time or whose field of study/employment lies in the technical/scientific fields. However, I claim that these people are rare, and they are rare because our cultural and social institutions do not lend themselves to critical thinking or self-reflection.

Our media, religious establishments, and work environment are not designed for self-reflection; rather, they are designed for efficiency and productivity. This is not to say that within these settings, an individual can never achieve any meaningful degree of critical clarity. All I'm claiming is that whatever opportunity for critical thinking that emerges in these settings is accidental, because these institutions are not designed for critical thinking.

Our society encourages and produces a lifestyle that is extremely quick: we value efficiency and multi-tasking. At work we rarely have the time needed for extended thought processes. Instead work for most people consist of immediate deadlines. Once we are at home, we are so tired from work that we do not have the energy to think for any extended period of time. We are either consumed by domestic labors--taking care of the kids, cleaning up the house, buying groceries, making food, and so forth--or so burned out that we'd rather not, I think with good reason, want to think too much any longer. Our media is also characterized by a quickness that discourages critical thinking. Our religious institutions emphasize faith rather than thought.

Because of this, the humanities provide an institutional arrangement, in the form of the university and its academia, a space to engage in self-reflection and critical thinking. Of course it is contingent, because if our society did provide enough opportunity for greater self-reflection, then the academia would lose its institutional value. But it is highly unlikely that our society will change, and insofar as it is unlikely to change, the humanities will continue to have some value left.

But one can further object by asking why should those who do not value the opportunities for self-reflection that the humanities provide have to pay for it? I might reply that there could be an arrangement in which the humanities are separated from the technical/scientific fields and become separate educational entities. Thus, those who do not value the humanities don't have to pay for it, and those who do can.

This is a very rough outline of the argument, so don't be surprised if there are still many holes left to address. But in its rough form, it is probably the only argument I can come up with, since I don't want to, as Fish does, give up justifying humanities altogether.

American Democracy Turned Upside Down

2008-01-12T00:35:00.000-08:00

"Tyranny of the majority" has been a key concept in American political philosophy. One can plausibly claim that it is the foundational concept of the American political system. But does the concept still hold today? Or perhaps, how much relevance does the concept still have for contemporary American politics?

While the tyranny of the majority is always a risk in any democratic polity, I believe that it is less likely to occur in America today, and this is in no small part due to the very good job the founders have done in creating institutional barriers that make the formation of an overwhelming majority highly unlikely, if not impossible.

But I contend that Americans today face a problem of an almost inverted nature: it is not the case that we fear a majority that will deprive those of us in the minority of our rights; it is rather that what the majority of Americans regard as common, public goods cannot be realized because of the disproportionate influence and power wielded by minorities.

If you read enough opinion polls, a picture emerges: there are indeed certain goods which most Americans agree as common goods, i.e., equitable public education, affordable health care for every citizen, a cleaner environment, an energy policy that is less dependent upon crude oils imported from foreign countries.

Yet anyone who is remotely familiar with our current political landscape knows that these things, despite being perceived as public goods, have thus far not been realized. And in each of these instances, at least some of the explanation involves well-organized minorities whose interest conflict with public opinion.

Therefore, what we have today in America is a problem whose nature is diametrically opposite than the problems that the founders foresaw with democracy: instead of a majority oppressing the minority, it is the minority that prevents the majority from pursuing and realizing common goods. In fact, I might even say that the Founders did too good of a job from preventing the formation of a possibly oppressive majority such that well-organized and resourceful majorities can effectively prevent majority action.

Of course there is something to be said about this institutional arrangement, because it does effectively prevent a majority from becoming too oppressive. American history bears this out too, for the most part. We did not witness the formation of a hyper-collective polity in our history, unlike Nazism and Communism in Europe.

However, some of the blame must also lie with the American people. While I think it might have been justified to fear any signs of a majority of statism, I think those fears are no longer justified in this post-Cold War age in which we no longer face Communism. However, the rhetoric of anti-statism and collective action persists and has become even more inflammatory after the Cold War, resulting in today's bitter partisanship between so-called liberals and conservatives, free-marketeers and socialists, Republicans and Democrats.

Again, I'm not proposing that Americans should trust their governments in total, because a healthy dose of scepticism is absolutely necessary. However, I do think that Americans have gone overboard with their anti-statist tendencies, because not all majoritarian actions and interests are inherently oppressive, especially if the majoritarian interests are about things that almost everyone can agree upon as normatively right, such as equitable public education and affordable health care.

And yet still, some of the blame must also be put upon our political leaders, who have continued to use inflammatory rhetoric to stoke popular myths and prejudices for political gains.

In essence, if any change is to occur at all, it must come from a change in attitude in the American people, both among voters and politicians. While they should correctly value scepticism, it is high time that they, and we, realize that not all collective action leads to oppression and deprivation of rights. In this case, as it is in all human affair, the essence is judgment. It is high time that the American people use theirs to determine what it is that they really want and not be blinded by their own prejudices.

The President and the Economy

2008-01-11T11:48:00.000-08:00

Question: what is more American than apple pie?

Answer: voters expecting Presidents to fix the economy during election season.

I am always amused when voters do this, because really, the President doesn't have that much power to "fix" the economy and achieve Paradise on Earth. Yet every four years, voters pin their fears and hopes about the economy on presidential candidates, and the candidates too pose as populists, supply-side, demand-side, and so-forth.

They play right into the expectations.

But here's the thing: if we Americans are so insistent on doing everything through a market mechanism, why are we also so insistent that our Presidents should interfere in that very mechanism? In other words, if we are so averse to any kind of, god-forbid, "political interference in the market", then why are we so keen on a POLITICAL solution to our economic problems?

Then again, this only confirms the fact that American voters are ill-informed and inconsistent in their opinion and knowledge of how our economy, and more importantly, our political system, actually works.

But let's assume that this contradiction doesn't exist, for argument's sake. Let's see what the President can actually do to "fix" the economy.

First, he has budget powers as the head of the executive agencies. But that power is checked by Congress, so if we have a divided government, the President's power is severely limited, i.e., Bush during his second term.

But other than that, what CONSTITUTIONALLY-endowed powers does the President have to fix the economy? I cannot think of anything else. Anything that the President might do, he must also content with Congress, so it's really unrealistic to expect what presidential candidates say about the economy will actually be implemented once he is in office.

And whatever "meddling" the government does in the economy is, for the large part, done through the Federal Reserves, via monetary policy, which the President can't really control since the Federal Reserve System is part private, part public.

So if voters are really concerned about the economy, and more importantly, INFORMED about how our economy works, they would be wise to ask presidential candidates what kind of people they will appoint to be the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. But then again, voters can't really tell Presidents whom to appoint. Neither are they interested when an opening does come up, like when Greenspan retired. Instead, all the interest comes from those in the know--i.e., think tanks, Beltway insiders, Wall Street, and academics.

Therefore, voters are asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. It is plain unrealistic to expect presidential candidates to make good on what they say about the economy during election season, because there are way too many other political actors with more influence and power.

Asking presidential candidates what they will do about the economy once they are in office is kind of like asking a blind man how he's going to fix a leak in the ceiling.

An Interesting Claim about Marx

2007-12-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

While surfing the philosophy blogs, I came upon this interesting story: Pascal Lamy, the director of the WTO, claims that Marxist thought still has a lot to offer to anyone seriously interested in analyzing global capitalism. Furthermore, he makes the claim that global capitalism, in its current form, needs improvement.

One thing Lamy says particularly stood out to me: "It [capitalism] is a means that must remain in the service of human development. Not an end in itself."

This is by far the most sensible thing I've read about capitalism in a long while, especially in our contemporary debates about capitalism. Today, you have your stereotypical Left and Right shouting past each other, in which free-market capitalism is either a villain or a savior.

I have always found this mode of discourse to be unproductive, and even worse, conceptually sloppy. It is safe to say that 90 percent of the participants in this discussion don't really know what the fuck they are talking about. In fact, it's entirely possible that the people who regularly invoke Adam Smith and Karl Marx and hold them up as saints/devils have not read the works written by either thinker.

But by far the thing that drives me crazy in this kind of discussion is the faulty assumption that free-market capitalism is its own entity. I completely disagree with this assumption: a market is just a process, a mechanism that has no inherent goal of its own. In other words, a market is not teleological.

The other related, faulty assumption is that the market will solve all of our social problems if we simply let it run absolutely free. Wrong again. A completely free market, under ideal conditions, would produce the most EFFICIENT results, not moral or ethical results. But the problems any given polity has to deal with is inherent normative.

The market isn't designed to solve these political problems. Political questions are solved by the political process; in our case, a democratic process. There is no inherent conceptual connection between a market and the political process.

Hence, what Lamy says makes a lot of sense to me: the market exists to serve human ends; not the other way around.

What is David Brooks Talking About?

2007-11-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

David Brooks should really just stick to talking about politics instead of music, as shown in today's New York Times column.

In it, Brooks laments the loss of a common, canonical musical tradition in America, and scorns the fragmentation of culture and the multiplying of niches, arguing, for instance, that

"Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices."

While there is certainly some truth in this--after all, a lot of so-called "indie" and "obscure" music are products of the recording industry machine designed to find previously unexplored market niches and sell to them--Brooks exaggerates this phenomenon.

Behind this veil of cultural criticism is a conservative commentary about politics: for the fragmentation in music is taken to be a reflection of the fragmentation in national unity. It is essentially a veiled criticism of multi-culturalism. The political subtext is that politics, as it is currently practiced, is a politics of division and partisanship, while the ideal politics is an appeal to national unity.

And it just so happens that it is the left and the liberals who, with their post-modern relativism they got from their grad schools, that is engendering this divide. Of course Brooks doesn't say this directly, but just take a look at what he says about people who listen to the so-called non-mainstream music:

"People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special."

This is not a surprising comment, given Brooks' conservative leanings, but I would argue that Brooks gets it wrong both about music and politics. Cultivating a taste for alternative and non-mainstream, non-canonical music is not, by definition, a rejection of the canon or cultural inheritance. That is a false dilemma. For it is possible, in cultivating a taste for the obscure and the marginalized, to synthesize and assimilate them into a richer, broader understanding of music.

Similarly, just because one takes opposing, radical, and previously unheard political ideas seriously does not mean that one is rejecting civic inheritance or the existent political culture. After all, isn't the very notion of the marketplace of ideas a testament to one's willingness to encounter resistance in a civil manner?

Brooks is mistaken in thinking that assertions of individualism, whether in the realm of culture or politics, is automatically a rejection of the community. In fact, I'd argue that neither can exist without the other.

It is really Brooks who is creating the division where there is none. And our political atmosphere is made all the more toxic by his shameless, veiled liberal-baiting tactics.

A Heidegerrian Account of Live Music

2007-11-06T19:20:00.000-08:00

Slate is running a pretty good exchange between Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical music critic, and Ben Ratliff, the New York Time's jazz critic. The exchange is pretty wide-ranging, touching upon various issues in the classical, jazz, and even the pop music world. Even though this exchange is in part motivated by commercial desires--both Alex Ross and Ben Ratliff have new books out right now on 20th-century classical music and John Coltrane respectively--it is still a pretty good discussion.

By the way, Alex Ross stopped by in Berkeley on his book tour, and having attended that particular event, I would have to say that he knows what he's talking about and conveys that kind of encyclopedic knowledge in readable prose that is accessible to the lay public. I haven't read Ben Ratliff's book yet, but it is almost a guarantee that I will, since John Coltrane is god to me.

But back to the point: the first question being tackled in this exchange concerns the dynamism, or more accurately, the lack thereof, in terms of audience in both contemporary classical and jazz worlds. To qualify, it is not that there has been new music worth getting excited about in contemporary classical and jazz; it is simply that these new artists are only known to those who are already in the know. Ratliff suggests one reason for this kind of exclusion and obscurity is a shift in the way music is conceived:

"I'm just talking about music that's meant to be understood as a self-contained, sellable thing, versus music that's a long, ongoing process."

This, in a nutshell, is Ratliff's main contention if you will, and it struck me as a kind of Heideggerian claim, even though I'm not sure that Ratliff even had Heidegger in mind. Music, if conceived as a self-contained entity, might plausibly fall under the category of the present-at-hand. It is plausible because Dasein discloses the present-at-hand through pure beholding, in Heidegger's terminology. In some ways I think "pure beholding" has become the prevalent way of encountering music nowadays, what with the advent of personal stereos, not to mention iPods.

If music, self-contained and commodified, is present-at-hand, what is music conceived as an ongoing process? First, can "ongoing" music be cashed out in terms of live music? In the case of jazz, I think so, because jazz is always improvisional to some degree, even though jazz itself is not hostile to rigorous composition per se (i.e., Duke Ellington). But the act of hearing jazz played live is definitely an ongoing experience, since a tune can always be improvised, changed, rehearsed, etc. as it is being played from night to night, gig to gig. The same might be said about rock shows in general. Classical, on the other hand, might be the exception.

Ratliff describes this experience quitely aptly when he says:

"Or maybe it's the same stuff that a band has been playing for the last couple of years, fully rehearsed through gigs, but the music doesn't necessarily have a planned route. It's always strolling somewhere and hoping it will run into someone it likes. Sometimes it becomes really killer, and you might even be able to figure out why, but you can't really know in advance."

The key component in live music, therefore, is potentiality. If this is the case, then live music in some sense has the being of Dasein, since Dasein understands its own Being as bound up in its potentiality. However, this is not to say that live music has the same kind of Being as Dasein, but simply that the two share similar structures.

But even this claim needs to be cashed out phenomenologically. Dasein discloses its Being to itself through understanding, which entails being "thrown" into a "mood". To say that Dasein is attuned to this mood is not the same as saying that Dasein accurately perceives with his senses; it is rather to say that Dasein has an intuitive grasp of his environment and its context. Thus, to grasp the mood of live music is not simply listening to the faithful reproduction of sound, for one can do this at home on a good stereo, but no one would mistake a stereo for being there.

Indeed, "being there" is not simply a colloquial expression--it describes the ontological structure of Dasein's grasping something: in this case live music. Experienced live show-goers know that there are more to live music than simply the performing of songs: the experienced live show-goer will know to pay attention to visual cues from both performers and audience, detect subtle changes in dynamics, and know when the lows and highs occur, etc. This is not to say that the true grasp of "mood" must necessarily be non-thematic or unconscious; instead, what this is saying is that being truly attuned to the mood entails more than just thematic understanding of music.

If one is truly attuned to the live music, then one enjoys the music that much more, and collectively too with other members of the audience, since they are also attuned to the music. Anyone who has been to shows will know what I'm talking about. And once again Ratliff seems to get this basic phenomenon right when he says that:

"You're looking for clues as well as listening for them, feeling your way through it just like the musicians are. When something truly clicks, you're in ecstasy."

In fact, Ratliff explicitly draws the contrast between knowing the music and understanding the music. Knowing, as a mode of disclosure, is grounded on the "pure beholding" that comes with the present-at-hand; understanding, on the other hand, discloses not through beholding but through the grasp of mood. Ratliff puts the contrast in the following way:

"Whereas with records, I can really know it, by listening over and over, but the terms somehow don't feel right."

Of course he doesn't use Heidegger's language, but I think he has a pretty intuitive grasp of Heideggeran concepts.

There are two reasons why I decided to write a blog about this in this kind of way. First, I am doing a "dry run", so to speak, for my next Heidegger paper, and it is a somewhat useful exercise for me to think about an issue in explicitly Heideggerian terms. Second, I find this Heideggerian account of live music plausible and persuasive, since it matches how I have experienced all the live music that I have heard.

The ironic thing is that while I was writing this blog, I was listening to a bootleg copy of a Hank Mobley show that he played at the Birdland club, named after Charlie Parker, aka "The Bird." The show has a great lineup with Hank Mobley, Billy Roots, Curtis Fuler, and Lee Morgan. And all as I was writing, I kept thinking that although whoever taped the show did a really good job in terms of capturing the sound, it is nowhere even close to seeing those guys play live.

And a Heideggerian account of live music might be a pretty good account of the gap between simply hearing recorded music (even of live shows) and actually Being There.

Movie Reviews For The Blind

2007-10-28T01:50:00.001-07:00

I've finally had time recently to watch movies again, like full films, from beginning to end. Luckily the films that I saw were all good and well worth the time.

1) Once Upon A Time In The West:

This is now my favorite Sergio Leone movie. Yes, it even beats out The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for me. This movie has everything: wide vista shots of the desert that must be seen on a large screen to be appreciated, masterful build up of tension, quick bursts of kinetic violence, a really hot chick, and lest I forget, Henry Fonda playing against type as a villain that blows away little kids and rapes women. And of course, there is Charles Bronson, always a badass motherfucker.

But more importantly, I think Leone took a more serious and sombre tone with this movie. Whereas the Man with No Name Trilogy felt like a celebration of frontier archetypes and mythical heroes, this movie is decided an eulogy for the same characters. Otherwise, there is not a whole lot of stylistic departure from other Sergio Leone movies: you still have the masterful ways in which he builds up tension and then releases it in quick bursts of violence, you still have your catchy Ennio Morricone score, and you always have the mythical characters.

2) The Killer of Sheep:

This is probably the best movie I've ever seen about poverty. It doesn't preach, it doesn't get sentimental, in fact, it doesn't even have a traditional story arc. Instead, everything is conveyed in the details: from the way the camera captures kids playing in Watts, from the way the main character slow dance silently to a Dinah Washington song, from the conversation around dinner tables.

But in the end, this is a movie with hope because it is a tribute to the way children manage to find joy even in the most hopeless situations, although the movie never hammers you over the head with this simple message. It is one of the most subtle movies I have ever seen, and if you grew up with today's Hollywood movies, you might find yourself asking what the point of the movie was, but then you'd be wrong, and have no taste in movies.

3) The Queen:

I rented this to see what the buzz was about with Helen Mirren's performance. Yes, I realized that I'm about 10 months late to the party, but that doesn't diminish Helen Mirren's performance. She totally deserved an Oscar for this, and the guy playing Tony Blair was pretty spot-on as well.

Really the only reason to see this movie is for the acting, since Princess Diana's death has been covered to death (lame pun), but what a fine acting job this is.

Without Music, Life Would Be A Mistake

2007-10-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

This weekend is the first weekend in a long while that I actually have some free time, since no major projects/papers/tests are coming up the Monday after.

So I did the only thing that can actually make me enjoy life: I listened to some live music.

First, Berkeley's symphony orchestra did a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. I always find it perplexing that people complain classical music is boring and slow. Obviously they have no listened to the final movement of this symphony, because it is dramatic, over-powering, and totally awesome! But seriously, the fourth movement always get me on the edge of my seat, waiting for the orchestra to reach its massive crescendo and let it fucking explode.

Second, on the way back, heard some blues coming out of Bobby G's, so I went in and ordered a pint of Sierra Nevada. It was a nice little blues cover band; they played some Elmore James, Clapton, and T-Bone Walker. There is nothing better to wind down the week than kicking back a beer and listening to the blues.

So now, at home, I'm going to put on a Dizzie Gillespie record and finish the night off with some Jack.

Neocons are not Conservatives

2007-10-26T02:51:00.000-07:00

The term "neo-conservative" is a very odd term: on its surface, you would think that the term means an updating of conservativism as a political/philosophical tradition. But then you'd be wrong.

For the current neo-conservative moment looks almost nothing like conservatism as it has been known in the history of ideas. Conservatism, as a philosophical tradition, dates back all the way to Aristotle, but "classical" conservatism can traces its origin to Edmund Burke, which lays it all out most famously in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

This kind of conservatism emphasizes continuity with tradition and history, conformity with natural laws, and pragmatism. The failure to adhere to these things, according to Burke, is the reason why the French Revolution produces chaos and terror. It is one of Burke's main points that the French Revolution completely cut itself off from tradition and history: instead of adjusting tradition to modernity, the French revolutionaries completely abandoned it, thus removing an anchor that stabilizes society, thus producing chaos.

The same kind of criticism can be applied to Iraq: in trying to export democracy, American-style, the neo-con movement has failed to deal with the existing facts: namely, that Iraq, a country divided along religious lines, would lapse into chaos once a stabilizing force (in this case Saddam's regime). Instead, the neo-cons had a fantasy of spreading democracy in the Middle-East while ignoring the region's history, trying to instill something which does not take into account existing situations.

This is why neo-cons are not true conservatives. Their foreign policy is completely ideological and overly moralized; it is impractical, unrealistic, and uncompromising. It is not moderate, nor deliberate, but full of macho and high rhetoric. All of these things are anti-thetical to true conservatism in the Burkean and Aristotlean vein.

The Iraqi Solution

2007-10-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

This post is very simple: in it I will propose a solution to the Iraqi problem that makes the most strategic sense. My answer comes straight from a realist perspective.

The answer is this: unleash the boiling civil war in Iraq in a controlled environment and deal with the consequences afterwards. I will now spell this out.

What happens in an uncontrolled civil war

1) That Iraq is in a civil war with the participants divided along religious lines can no longer be questioned.
2) That as soon as American military presence is withdrawn, as American public opinion demands, the civil war will escalate to a full-scale conflict.
3) That the Shiites will win is a very plausible assumption, since they are the majority population, and they have the support of Iran and Syria.
4) That the Kurds will suffer the most, since the Shiite-Sunni conflict will inevitably spread over to Kurdish territories, and because Kurdish rebels are provoking Turkish military excursion into Kurdish territories.
5) That the resulting civil war will have multiple participants--Shiite, Sunni, Kurds, Iran, Syria, and Turkey--all with competing interests.
6) That the most likely outcome of such a full-scale civil war would be a Shiite-dominated majority government that represses Sunni and Kurdish minorities, backed up by Iranian and Syrian influences, resulting in greater influence of two countries who are known sponsors of terrorists and who have explicitly anti-Israeli agendas.
7) That such an outcome represent a serious blow to American strategic interests in the region.

What happens in an controlled civil war?

1) Evacuate all Iraqi civilians who do not wish to participate in the conflict into friendly neighboring countries.
2) Cut off all potential hostile influences by setting up border security. This requires military presence along the Iraq-Iran, Iraq-Syria, Iraq-Turkey, and Iraq-Kurdish borders. In other words, minimize all external influences, and also preventing the civil war from spreading outside.
3) Let the civil war commence and run its course. Provide humanitarian relief when needed. Ensure that no sides obtain weapons of mass destruction.
4) If the initial prediction is correct, then the Shiites will emerge as the victors. At this point, it's wise to protect the Sunni and Kurdish minorities from extermination and/or repression from the Shiite victors.
5) This will most likely require the tri-partitioning of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish governments.
6) The new Shiite government will most likely seek alliance with Iran and Syria.
7) The US must then maintain some kind of military presence in the region, building bases in Sunni and Kurdish territories in exchange for protecting them against future military excursions by the Shiites or its allies. Furthermore, the US must maintain some kind of naval presence in the Gulf.
8) If this sounds like containment, it's because it is. The last thing the US would want is Iran and Syria exerting influence in the region through Iraq. The US must exert its own influence to counter.
9) Hope for the best: maybe after the war the two sides will tentatively reach out for reconciliation. Or maybe the next generation of Iranian political leadership will be willing to negotiate.

What this plan requires America to give up?

1) The assumption that democracy is easily transferrable to the rest of the world.
2) US-Arab relationship will deteriorate in the short to medium-term because of a US military presence in the region. But this is something that must be done if we want to have any kind of strategic interest in the region at all.

Why this solution makes the most sense?

1) Shiite-Sunni reconciliation is very unlikely in the foreseeable future, so it is just a matter of time when the US pulls out, which it most likely will given the direction of public opinion. It's better to pro-active engineer what will eventually happen, since America can still exert some kind of control.
2) A fragmented Iraq is better than an unified Iraq that represses its minorities and act as a proxy for Iran.
3) A smaller military presence in the region will let the US army do what it does best: small, precise, surgical strikes. The US, under my scenario, will no longer be tasked with managing a civil war, regime-building, or urban warfare. All it does is to act as a deterrence against future aggression. In a case of aggression, the US army can quickly project and stop the aggression.

A Lesson in Class Lines

2007-10-19T01:16:00.000-07:00

So I attended Alex Ross' lecture/Q&A session at Wheeler tonight in which he talked about his new book, The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century classical music. One of Ross' main points in his book is that classical music has been ossified and been banished to the cultural dust-bin of elites in the 20th century.

And he wants to make classical music relevant again, by arguing that classical music is not hermetically sealed from the rest of culture, high or low-brow.

Therefore it struck me as especially ironic, as I looked around the audiences gathered in Wheeler hall, eagerly awaiting Ross: 90 percent of them are old, white, and presumably well-off.

Exactly the kind of audiences that make classical music seem impenetrable to the general public.

So even in trying to arguing for the relevance of 20th century classical music, Ross finds himself speaking to an audience which presumably pay attention to classical music to begin with.

I saw maybe 10 other people in the audience my age; not a single member of the audience is African-American or Hispanic. In fact I think I was the only Asian person in the audience.

If that's not a demonstration of clear class lines in the politics of art, then I don't know what else is.

The Impossibility of Living A Moral Life?

2007-10-15T23:19:00.001-07:00

Is living a moral life impossible? I'm inclined to say yes, because in many instances, rational deliberation about morality will lead to conclusions that subvert common sense and demands one to do things that one would not usually do.

The first example that comes to mind is Peter Singer's argument about the moral obligation to donate to charities that help people far away geographically. People have this intuition that they ought to do something if it saves lives at no significant cost to themselves. Yet a lot of people do not donate to charities like OXFAM or UNICEF, which pose no significant cost to them, but can save people far away.

This is only one easy example; there are many other demands of morality which require people to do things that they do not want to do.

Traditionally philosophers have dealt with the demands of morality in roughly two ways. First, they either try to modify the premises such that a different, less demanding conclusion is raised; or, more rarely, they bite the bullet like Peter Singer does.

I personally find too much use of the first method to be disingenuous. Ethical philosophy should not be entirely about reconciling common sense intuition with systematic thinking; ethical philosophy should be the enterprise to find out what the right thing is. There is no logical necessity that states that these conclusions must not demand of us what we would not want to do.

That we do not want to follow the conclusions of moral deliberation does not mean that the conclusions are wrong; it may merely mean that we are incapable of living a moral life.

I am inclined to go with the latter, because through experience, I've observed that people rarely do the right thing, even if they really know what the right thing is. That we experience real moral dilemmas does not mean that there are two difficult choices; it could just mean that we are hesitant to choose the path that is difficult, but ultimately correct.

This, however, is not a reason to not try to act morally. The impossibility of living a moral life does not justify one's not even trying to act morally. In the end, the ethical thing, in fact, the only ethical thing, that we can possibly do is to try.

But we will fail, almost inevitably.

The Western and Law

2007-10-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

The western, as a film genre, typically depicts a frontier setting characterized by lawlessness in which different factions vied for power and rule, and often times a lone ranger (think the Clint Eastwood character The Man With No Name) comes on the scene and changes the balance of power.

That the western is characterized generically as taking place in the vacuum of law is all the more ironic since the western, at its heart, is about the purest exercise of individual autonomy in the Kantian sense.

The absence of law is only the absence of de facto law--that is, laws established by those who are in power in fact. The lone ranger archetype represents law in the Kantian sense, i.e., law that is derived from obeying noumenal moral truths that exist independently of any human institutions.

Kant defines autonomy as the individual's capacity to obey the rules that he has given himself: in other words, self-legislation. Ideally, the individual's practical reasoning can grasp the moral facts in themselves and obey them. In the context of the Western, this is exemplified by the lone ranger's living to his own code of conduct, instead of conforming to some pre-established order of things.

Therefore, the only person who is truly autonomous in the Western is the lone ranger, because he is the only one that exercises his practical reasoning. It is not surprising that in most Westerns, this lone ranger character usually ends up being right, although his reasons for acting are unorthodox or incomprehensible to most other characters. All that demonstrates is that the lone ranger is the only one who grasps these noumenal truths.

So the Western is very deceptive in its seeming a-morality, since its core is undoubtedly morality itself. What the Western essentially is is a kind of morality play, at least in its classical conception. I'm not including the more modern ones because they are revisionist and deliberately play against genre conventions.

The fact that the lone ranger often has to fight against the supposed "law," embodied by corrupt sheriffs and so forth, is all the more evidence indicating that the Western is concerned about a priori morality before any kind of institutionalization.

Using Evolutionary in Ethics

2007-10-12T13:11:00.001-07:00

On the whole, I find citing evolutionary claims in arguments about ethics to be unproductive, because to me, such a move undermines the nature of ethical inquiry: trying to figure out what the right thing is to do in the circumstances at hand. Citing evolutionary arguments undermines this effort because it moves the argument from a prospective, deliberative point of view to a retrospective, explanatory point of view.

Both kind of perspectives have their uses, but to cite evolutionary claims when deciding what to do seems to miss the point.

For example, there has been no lack of articles and academic papers that seek to interpret altruism and acts motivated by altruism as evolutionary vestiges. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, if one's aim is to explain something which already exists: namely, that a lot of people act for altruistic reasons. Then the evolutionary claims cited are perfectly reasonable.

However, I find empirical/scientific explanations not at all helpful from the agent's perspective when he's trying to decide what to do. So when I find myself in a situation in which one possible way to act is to act altruistically, knowing the fact that altruism is an evolutionary response doesn't help me decide whether I should act altruistically or not.

One might, however, make the argument that knowing altruism is an evolutionary response does in fact help me make a decision. After all, the reasoning goes, if altruism comes about as an evolutionary mechanism that helps the survival of the species, why not continue? My reason for rejecting this line of reasoning is that evolution is a random, blind process. It is not that evolution chose altruism among a list of options; rather, altruism survives because those ancient human beings who are altruistic have survived this far.

But because this claim is based on past experiences, it is inductive by nature; and by its inductive nature, there is absolutely no a priori guarantee that in this day and age that those who act altruistically are more likely to survive in the future than those who do not. Evolution helps us understand why it is that some species survive long-term whereas others do not, but this explanation is always retrospective and after the fact. And evolution also does not rule out the possibility that those traits conducive to individual survival are in fact harmful to the species as a whole.

My point is that moral deliberation is always about what one will do in any given situation in which no definite possibilities are immediately obvious. Moral decisions are decisions about the future, and as such, evolutionary claims don't help the moral agent in his deliberative process. Even if we agree that the survival of the species can act as a normative guideline, among many other normative guidelines, there is no way to judge whether a specific act done by a specific moral agent at a specific point in time will meet the normative goal of species-survival until much later after the fact (essentially thousands of years later, probably even longer).

Therefore, evolutionary considerations don't really help the agent to decide. Because of this, using evolutionary claims in ethical considerations do not serve the purpose that ethical consideration is aiming at.

How To Vote Rationally?

2007-10-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

Isn't the answer easy? To vote rationally is to abstain.

But suppose that you were held at gunpoint to vote (Vote or Die bitch!), what is the most rational allocation of your resources? In other words, in which contexts should you vote?

I answer the question by making two assumptions. First, in determining what a rational allocation of resources is in the voting context, I assume that the more likely your vote would be the deciding vote, the more rational it is to vote in that context. Second, the more effective your vote is, efficiency defined as the ability of your vote to translate into policies that you want, the more rational it is to vote.

From those two premises, I generate one conclusion: the more local the election, the more rational it is to vote. Now this conclusion is not without exception, since there are structural reasons for why one should vote for Congressional elections than for the county education board. But in general, the trend holds true.

First, the probability of your vote becoming THE deciding vote. In a presidential election, your vote has a 1 in 200 million chance of being the deciding vote (in an absolute, strict, and literal majority), assuming that roughly all US population turns out, but turnout level is largely irrelevant to this discussion. However, once you get to the level of voting in Congressional districts, your vote has about a 1-in-3000 or so chance of becoming the deciding vote. If you vote at a county or a municipal level, that chance goes up even more.

Granted, none of those probabilities are very high, but since what we are talking about is strict rationality, the higher that chance, the more rational it is for you to vote.

The trend also holds for another reason: the less constituents there are under a political actor, the more responsive he becomes to the interests of his constituents. Thus, the president must respond to the interest of the country, which is inevitably inconsistent, non-uniform, all compromising each other's effectiveness. However, a Congress man only represents a single district, so he responds to the interests of a much smaller group of people, which means that it is more likely for any given individual to voice his interest and be heard. The effectiveness increases even more at the municipal level, since a constituent can simply go see his representative in person.

As the number of constituents go down, access becomes increasingly easier, thereby increasing the chance that any given individual's preferences will be realized.

Therefore, these two effects combine to make voting at the more local level a more rational allocation of resources.

However, this trend does not hold up linearly, since the most local elections do not affect the things that matter to the constituent. After all, municipal elections do not control welfare, health insurance, tax policy, and so forth. This is not a structural problem, but instead a historical one, since historically, the federal government has come to exercise more and more power over those of local and state governments.

But what is certain is that voting for presidential elections represents the least rational allocation of resources, for reasons mentioned above. Therefore, the rational voter must find a balance that is the most rational, given the kind of issues that he cares the most about. But I imagine for most people, the most rational way to vote is to vote for their Congressional representative, due to the historical reason just mentioned.

Therefore, it is kind of misleading on my part to say what the most rational vote is, but what I am reasonably sure of is that voting for presidential elections is the most irrational allocation of resources.

George W. Bush and Radiohead

2007-10-11T16:51:00.000-07:00

Now, normally, the only sentence that contains both "George W. Bush" and "Radiohead" would be something like "Radiohead does not like George W. Bush." After all, they even named an album after Bush in a pejorative fashion.

But the connection goes deeper. People don't want to pony up the dough for the Discbox, because the Euro is a much stronger currency than the dollar right now. 40Euros is about $81 dollars, making the Euro worth twice as much as the dollar.

And for that, you can thank George W. Bush in a large part. But how, you ask? Good question.

Let's start with the obvious: the ballooning budget deficit. When GWB came into office in 2000, we had trillions of surplus, which might have gone to pay off our debts. But instead, GWB decided to cut taxes. Furthermore, he cut even more taxes during wartime, something which has no precedent in American history. Of course, you can't blame the deficit increase all on him, since September 11, combined with the bursting of the tech bubble, contributed to the depression we had in 2001-2002. But a large part of our increasing deficit can be traced back to GWB's administration.

Second: the trade deficit. China is now a big issue to the public, but becausely babies start to get sick from plastic toys with too much lead. But the trade deficit with China by itself is not anything new.

Third: decreasing exports. So while as we import more cheap Chinese-made goods, our exports are decreasing, even more so than before. No one wants to buy our products. Why? Probably because American goods are just not that good. Why? Because we don't invest enough in our education. We don't invest in career-training for those workers displaced by manufacturing outsourcing.

Finally: too much easy credit. So what has been happening was that American consumers have been borrowing heavily on easy credit to purchase imported goods. Eventually, the credit bubble burst, and we are seeing that play out today.

All of this add up to this: the dollar is becoming less valuable, and its worth is falling quickly against the Euro.

Therefore, people who want to get the Radiohead boxset can't afford to do so because the weak dollar.

Radiohead - In Rainbows

2007-10-09T23:28:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing the conversation went something like this.

Thom: Quite good, isn't it?
Jonny: I do say so myself.
Ed: Cup of tea gentlemen?

Anyways, there are only three things that I will say about this album, at least for now.

1) It's Radiohead's most accessible album
2) It's Radiohead's best album
3) It might be the album of the decade.

Check it out for yourself

This Is Your Brain on Bad Journalism

2007-10-09T17:48:00.000-07:00

Why has Hillary's belly-laugh suddenly become the hot topic of the election cycle?

Sometimes I think if CNN really doesn't have anything substantial to report, it should just play old episodes of Looney Toons or Tom and Jerry. That way, I'd watch CNN all day long.

Hell, even the New Yorker, a magazine whom I have some shred of respect for, has an article about it. Even if the article points out the triviality of such a small thing, it nonetheless adds to fuel to the fire.

Why such an obviously pre-calculated, pre-packaged, focus group-tested gesture designed to show Hillary's "humanity" should get such an inordinate amount of attention is truly beyond me. What better way than to show off your authentic and spontaneous humanity by carefully testing it with a focus-group that was put together by a professional consulting firm?

This is the perversion (or as some would say, STRATEGERY) of presidential election coverage: the most trivial things are always deliberately planned down to the last detail, and like flies on dog shit, pundits eat it up.

Eventually, if you consume enough of this kind of atrocious journalism, your mind will look something like this:

Which is to say: kind of good looking, but full of shit.

Socialized Medicine Is The New Boogeyman

2007-10-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if politicians really know what they are actually mouthing off about? Take the recent discussion surrounding both Hillary Clinton's proposal for universal healthcare and Bush's veto on SCHIP.

Somehow, some way, two words are always brought up to attack the left side of the story: SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

The term is the new boogie man used to scare ignorant, but otherwise well-intentioned, old-school fiscal conservatives. What does the term even mean? That the state should provide a minimum level of healthcare to all of its citizens? The last time I checked, that appeared to be a legitimate public good (not in the economic sense, but in the moral sense).

Or so Americans think anyways. But whenever the words "socialized medicine" are brought up, we automatically go into Cold War mode, reverting back to the same old rhetoric. Listen people, communism is no longer a spectre that haunts the globe; there is no more left to contain.

It just amuses me to the most that the same people who bring up "socialized medicine" as a response are also the same people who have no problem with the fact that education is also public and universal. Why isn't our current educational system "socialized education" by that very same logic?

Yet no politician can get away with making this kind of argument, because that's political suicide. So who are the hypocrites here? All this hypocrisy shows is that our policies are shaped by the public, so there is no reason why a universal healthcare system is normatively wrong if the public supports it.

Just how long do we have to bear with the Socialist Boogeyman? The Cold War is over; communism is no longer a threat; but maybe some people in DC haven't been up to speed.